Feedback for underwater scene

[ben_hamburg]

hey everybody,

I´m having a hard time with lighting a scene for my shortfilm about Tardigrades...:



Its not bad as it is, but I´m still not quite happy with the underwater look.
Its basically all compositing based: I use the Zbuffer for the environment fog and some extra layer god rays with standard 3ds max volume light.
DoF is added in post, except for the Dust particles, those are rendered as extra layer with DoF enabled, because Dof in post doesn´t play well with small objects.

I´d like to get more of a one pass solution with VrayEnvironment fog and in camera Dof, mostly because there isn´t much reference out there for a shot like this and I´d rather get a better idea about the physicality of things before getting too artistic and just imgagining how things might look like. But I´m having hard time lighting with environment fog on.
It gets too washed out or too dense in the foreground and I can´t get nice god rays with it.
Problem is probably too many VrayLights with too big of a radius, so I´ll try just using one Vray Sun or Directional light next and only after I get the main light right add some more lights as needed to make the tardigrade pop.

So...how would you tackle this?
Do you have any other feedback or cool underwater references?

[ben_hamburg]

Ok, I´m playing around with Vray sun and Environment and the results look promising. Its still a difficult balance to get dense enough environment fog and still retain the details of the hero character...I´ll post my update soon.

One more question regarding god rays though, after reading this thread:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...nvironment-fog

Do I need to position the vray sun above the environment fogs height to get the best results?

[ben_hamburg]

Ok, I think I´m going for the fully render version, just looks more natural...still struggling to get nice god rays, they are just super sensitive to the position of the light, so its a long process of back and forth between good lighting overall and nice god rays and on top of that they get blurred by DoF, when they are too far in the background...