yeero

Tracer's big splash

Added 2025-09-05 23:24:28 +0000 UTC

This is the second image in the summer themed set mentioned in the previous post. It's heavily inspired by a photo I saw where the subject was holding a bathing ring (is that even what they're called) above their head, and it created this beautiful lighting and composition. I wanted to do something similar in Blender, but I struggled for a long time with the lighting. The main challenge was getting a nice sunlit feel while also having the colorful dispersion caused by the bathing ring.

This is what the first draft looked like:

The basic philosophy that I settled on was having the sun behind her, allowing the bathing ring to act as fill and top lighting for her front. I wasn't unhappy with this first take, but the image itself just wasn't that interesting. It wasn't until I came up with the idea to have a big wave splash against her that I finally felt like the image had some sort of quality that made it cool. Making the wave itself wasn't as challenging as I thought it would be. It's essentially made up of 3 elements:

1. A fluid simulation of the enveloping splash
2. A simple modeled wave that she's standing in
3. A bunch of .png splashes to add detail

(Shout outs to the talented Forceballfx for helping me with the wave, and supplying the bathing ring model!)

I also had fun coming up with a new method to add droplets to a model. Traditionally, the way I and many others add that wet/sweaty look to skin is by combining the model's Roughness and Normal maps with a rain texture. This is how you get those streaks of water running across the model that help sell the look of wet skin. While this approach works fine, it's not very physically accurate. The problem is that you're missing the refraction and transmission of the water on the skin, and that makes it look kind of plasticy. The method I used actually adds a physical layer of droplets on top of the skin material, which allows for proper refraction and transmission.
Here's a side by side comparison of the two approaches:

(Old is left, new is right)