Patreon Peeks 6: A Swirling School of Fish (Patreon)

Hello! This week I have a breakdown of a visual I used early on in my collaboration with Austin Wintory about ABZÛ's soundtrack ( https://youtu.be/0S8WGtbYvSg )(Don't worry, it occurs around 2:05, well before any spoilers for the game). It's a silhouette of a school of fish swimming in a ring, reminiscent of the iconic procedural school you encounter and swim amongst in ABZÛ.

Here's a raw frame from the render:

I created this scene in Blender before any other visuals were designed: I knew I wanted to pay homage to this school of fish somewhere in the video. It involved a big torus that creates a particle system of fish objects.

This creates the general shape of the fish ring. Next, I added a vortex force that would cause the fish to rotate around that axis (now highlighted in orange):

This got the fish particles moving the right way, but the vortex force doesn't have a natural outer limit, so the fish quickly spun out of reach of the camera. The strategy to wrangle them into a manageable yet still natural ring was to create a new torus:

This acts as the outer limit of where the fish can travel, plus its surface emits a physical force inward, keeping the fish within it and anchoring them against the vortex force. The reason this torus looks distorted is that I gave it a slight displacement map that moves every frame, causing it to ripple slowly, softly, like water. This lets the fish ring contort and flex a little without totally breaking formation, which looked a lot more like the fish were deciding where to go naturally. And finally:

I made four different fish objects, each getting very simply deformed by the empty objects at their heads. This made them look like they were swimming, but not all in sync. The particle system chooses randomly from this group to populate the fish ring, and the result, while not quite as impressive as ABZÛ's fish school, gets the visual point absolutely across without looking completely mechanical.

The last touch was giving the fish a material that gets lighter as distance increases from the camera, and then giving them a little motion blur in After Effects. Paired with visuals of a symmetrical musical pattern in the final video, I daresay it came out looking pretty cool!