Making the Cheddar Warrior - looking into the water

3D software packages these days have powerful methods of creating all sorts of materials. However sometimes you can save a lot of time by combining the power of your 3D software with your 2D software. The 3D software I used was Cinema 4D and the 2D one was Photoshop. Here's how I gave the illusion of water.

1 - Top level

The stuff you can see is the uppermost layer in my composited scene.

The grey and white checker board pattern is Photoshop's way of telling me that part of the image is completely empty. And that means it's going to reveal whatever layer I put underneath it.

2 - Tide's out

In this next step, I've put a render of sand and pebbles underneath the foreground layer. So the eye interprets it as being behind the boat. It looks like the sand continues on forever, which is just the impression I want to make. But I'll flood it with water next.

3 - Tide's in

Here's the water. The water is hiding the sand because you can't see through it yet. So it's time to use some of the power of Photoshop...

4 - Transparency

Here you can see what I've done to the water. I've made it transparent at the bottom of the picture going up to not transparent at the top of the picture. You can judge the amount of transparency by how much of that grey checker board pattern you can see through it.

In the next step we won't be seeing grey checker board through the water. We'll be seeing the sand.

5 - Instant water

... And here's the sand seen through that semi-transparent water. This was really quick - only about ten seconds of 'work' to get this effect. That's why I chose this method instead of setting it all up in the 3D program. As much as I love 3D, I love my time even more!

Making the Cheddar Warrior

• The foreground leaves
• The background tree
• Making a mouse
• The hairy bits
• The cheesy bits
• The hazy bits
• Sticking it all together

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