Hey I am doing an under the water scene with dolphin and different varieties of fish
My question is does any one know of a way to do fish scales and make it look realistic I have a clown fish that I made low poly and I want to add some scales to that fish but not sure how.
Can anyone help me
I tried texture painting this as well and it really looked fake.
I wouldn’t model scales. Instead, use a bump map. Pretty sure you’ll find a lot of fine examples when googling for “scales bump map”.
I planned to do a trout ( Im an angler) a while back but never finished it. I did make a number of seamless scales bump textures though using Inkscape and they were fairly easy to do. I did a few renders of snakes bodies and fish “sides” to test it out and was fairly pleased with the intitial results - obviously not using a very strong bump though. I never got round to the next stage though which was how to get the irridescant sheen taht you often get with fish.
Anyone got a good trout model by any chance?
@Meshmonkey Thank you I have been looking at them and I did experiment with it today
Modron thanks I will check that out.
Bunc I am just a beginner but i have been experimenting with the nodes I would try the color ramp, and rgbmix. I learned alot just from experimenting and watching YouTube. I hope that helps
i would recomend displacement modifier. you will have a very high polycount though, but you will get the actual scales as geometry.
It all depends on on how large you want the fish to be and if it’s the single main focus of the scene. If your piece is a close up of a single fish, then yeah, finalbirrage is right. Nothing will look as good and several subsurfs and a displacement modifier. You’ll probably burn through poly budget with one fish. If you plan on a school of 100, a good normal map is the way to go.
Also you might consider a level or two of multresolution sculpting. sculpt out the lips a little. also you are missing gills. you can probably sculpt gills with multires. Reference, referenc, reference is the key.
finalbirrage Thanks that is a great idea
Photox that would be great to sculpting I will consider that when I do more fish for the scene that I am creating. The Clown fish now has gills now.
i think it can be done using hair
this is my 5-minute example
