I used this project as an excuse to teach myself to use Arnold in Maya. Aside from not having access to a render farm, I really enjoyed seeing the render results but the amount of time it took to render each frame forced me to cut back on quality. I had only a couple weeks to create all the assets seen in this video. Aside from the typefaces, audio and logos at the end, I handled everything myself.

The water is actually just a number of 2D solids that I masked and distorted to look like liquid within After Effects. Nothing within the sub utilizes any 2D textures or elements.

I had experimented with blobby particles for the rising water and even had a particle system set up for the leak at the crack in the sub, but due to time limitations, I had instead used a scaling cube for timing the Technicians animations.

Once everything was imported into After Effects, I'd decided to use a series of Solids to make fake rising water at a low render cost.