Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bullshittery - Update #8

Just another short update on the cinematic animations. Some people said they found the previous behind-the-scene gifs interesting. Happy to provide a few more!

So the second cinematic, just before the title sequence, involves the camera moving from an underwater perspective, to back above the water, before a fade to black, as the bullshittery continues. To create this, I've employing a few simple tricks with parallax. Using the animation assets provided by the commissioned artists.

First I'd create a tall composite background in After Effects. Using a series of blacks and deep blues, with some feathering to make a gradient. This is to create a fake ocean.

After that I parent everything to a NullObject. One of those invisible squares I keep talking about in keyframing. And from there I can control position, scaling, rotation, etc and all of it will filter down to the child layers.

Placing it in the main camera view then creates the illusion of motion if I pan it up. The camera isn't actually moving. I'm just cycling the background. I pull this sort of trick all the time in the bullshitteries. You know when text flies at the screen? It's not. I'm merely fiddling with the scaling in a fixed frame, using NullObjects.

After that, I took an image of some scattered bubbles and added a blur filter. Putting them on a completely different NullObject to make them slowly drift. And voila, 'marine snow'. The little organic particles suspended in the ocean.

I can also make these move down faster, when the background is moving down, to make it seem as if the movement is faster than it is. So when the camera looks as though it's panning up, the marine snow starts falling much faster.

After this point, the work of the artist NervousHawk comes into play. They've created a whole host of random ship debris that gives the viewer something to look at whilst the intro music is playing. Drawn from reference material provided by the stream. Things like crates,  doors, pulleys, cages, etc.

This is added to the composite and the timings are carefully adjusted. To make it seem as though the Merryweather is breaking apart on the surface above.

Some of the more flappy pieces of debris, such as ropes or sails, can be manipulated with some simple warping. Doing this makes it appear as though they're drifting with the water.

Combine all the composites together and you get something like this. As the viewer ascends up to the surface to view BewBewDingo's title screen.

I plan to add lots of bubbles to the sinking objects. Notably things like barrels and sacks. But that requires particle effects simulators. And experience tells me that these are ruinously hard on minimum rendering requirements. So I'm absolutely saving that for the final stages of the editing. Doing it early will just make it harder to review.

Editing continues! Trying to get these animations looking right. Being the first of the playlist, I'm really keen to make it stand out :)