FMP: Week 13 Tuesday

On Tuesday I researched a fish to use that fit with the locational theming, which ended up being a transparent dwarfgoby, native to places like Japan and Guam and found stray in Malaysia. I chose this fish as it had colours similar to the original concept, but was also pretty to look at and had a generic, identifiable fish shape.

I moved around some of the items that hadn't yet been modelled in the alpha texture sheet and painted one side of the fish to reduce the space used.

I separated two of the fins so that I could slot them onto the side of the fish model afterwards without it looking flat.
I also simplified the pattern a bit more so that it would be more distinct from a distance.

Resulting fish

I assigned the texture to a plane and cut topology around the base of the fish to capture the silhouette rather than keeping the edges as an alpha. This is because I wanted to be able to shell it and then weld the edges together to make the fish 3d. I made sure to add extra space at the top of the fish texture so that there would be space between the eyes at the top of the mesh, while still having the efficiency of using the fish texture like a trim sheet on each side of the fish.

I kept it lowpoly as it would be small in the level and under the water.

Originally, I wanted to sculpt the fish in zbrush and use the scale noise available within the software, but decided against it when considering my time constraints, how the pandemic has further limited my time and the priority of it against the other things I needed to add to my scene.