Koi Fish Animation

Quite a fun project I took on for a client at my university. The intial demands of the client was to create a suite of four animations which had to be fun, engaging and/or relaxing for the audience. Out of the four animations that were supplied to the client, they identified this animation to be the most outstanding. Subsequently, I rendered various angles and versions of the animation, and it was successfully deployed on location at the Curtin University library.
Everything in the scene excluding the vegetation underneath the water, and the large plants above the water was created by me. The assets that i didn't create were taken from Autodesk Maya's content browser.
The koi model has 866 faces and was created in Autodesk Maya by simply extruding faces until the mesh was complete. I then creating the UV using Maya's UV toolkit, and took the model into Substance Painter. Inside Substance, I used a variety of simple brushes to create the desired patterns and colours that I wanted.
The rigging for the fish was once again completed in Maya. The features that were built into the rig include: 
- Automatic swimming animation via Maya deformers. 
- Manual tail and head aim. 
- Mouth and wing animation. 
While the mouth and wing animation controls weren't needed for the animation since there would be no close up shots of the models that would show that level of animation, I none the less included that functionality.
The rocky bottom was completed by using the Shatter function built into the Bullet toolkit inside of Maya. 
The pedestals were textured by using simple noise textures inside of Maya. 
The flowers were creating via simple extrusion. 
For the lily pads, i created the shape, and decimated it using Maya's Remesh tool. I used a noise texture to create the textures, and the deform the model every so slightly. 
I created the water by applying a Boss ocean modifier to it, before exporting it out as an alembic case to reduce file size.
I rendered various different versions of the animation using Maya's Arnold render engine. A horizontal view where the camera pans across the scene and horizontal and vertical versions with both fixed and swaying cameras.