Freshwater aquarium, part 3

One of the nice features of working on a longer project is that I don't have to come up with introductions. 

Previously on Honest misskates:  

The aquarium saw its textures improved. It welcomed several plant species that were made to look more varied than they actually were. And water is still nowhere to be seen. Is this an aquarium at all? And will this week bring the first fish? Or will the author fail miserably when trying to create partially transparent textures? Stay tuned to find out.

OK, now on a more sane note. I'd like to sculpt, retopologize and texture paint at least two fish species this week. (Sane, huh?) Seems like a lot of work to do but I hope that my previous experience will help speed things up a bit.

***

I think I'll skip the part where I describe creation of the base mesh and move on to the finished sculpture. I've chosen a platy as the first fish to sculpt. It is one of the species commonly kept in beginners' aquariums and it looks interesting enough to deserve its place in the tank. I used the Clay Strips brush to add detail to the fins but the rest was done using the usual Inflate + Grab combo.

Speaking of fins, however. How many of them does a fish need? Jeez. And they all have funny names, too. Pectoral fins, pelvic fins, anal fin, dorsal fin, caudal fin... Bloody hard-to-sculpt fins, that's what they are. And they look different in each picture and I started from one reference and then changed them mid-way, and... You've heard this before, haven't you? I'll show myself out, then.

Now I just need to retopologize it and then it's the UV unwrapping time! (I wonder if I still remember some of the cool tricks with the Shrinkwrap modifier. Let's see...).

***

Alright, retopologizing went... fine? The Shrinkwrap modifier really is an invaluable tool when it comes to retopology.

My only gripe with it is that, for some reason, it didn't want to work well with Mirror. When I put it first in stack, it didn't let me merge the middle vertices, and if it was second in stack, applying it unmerged some of the vertices. And since I needed to apply it quite often (to change the real position of the mesh to something workable), I had to redo the merging manually. Until I realized I could select the whole loop and move it on X with clipping on. (I found out quite late but at least I'll remember it when I'm working on the next fish).

UV unwrapping was also quite fast, and even more surprisingly, the normal map I baked turned out decent. I didn't use cage this time, so I had to manually fix some artifacts in the texture paint mode, but the resulting mesh looks nice (I also increased strength of the normal map to 2).

And now it's finally time for the dreaded texture painting. I've come up with an idea for the transparency and I wonder whether it will work or not. I want to paint a regular color map and then another one, black-and-white. The white portion will indicate where the transparency should occur. If I plug it into a mixture of Principled and Transparent shaders, it might just work.

***

Bah, that doesn't look very good, does it? It's a quick test of the transparency, so I'm using provisional textures for the moment. (They might get better. Maybe.) And it... kinda works? The white parts are transparent, the rest is diffuse, it's just that it looks... odd. I also tried other shaders, like Translucent and Glass (that one was especially weird) and then I added a Math node to play with the intensity of transparency, and I tinkered with some of the math operations. The winner seems to be "subtract 0.05". Yeah, I don't know how that works either. I should focus on finishing the texture—maybe it will improve dramatically.

***

Nope. Still awful.

***

And since I'm once again very much not on time, I'll jump directly to the next fish. Which is... neon tetra. Ta-daa! Eh, alright. It's also one of the most common ones (some of you might start to see a theme here), but! It's more colorful, hmm? Still not interested? *Sigh* There is no pleasing you, people. (For the hundredth time, I'm not going to put Nemo in there. Clownfish live in the sea. This is a freshwater aquarium! And yes, it does matter! Grrr.)

Ok, with the rant officially over, I can show you the finished sculpture now.

It might not seem very different from the platy, but wait until I texture-paint it. It will also be smaller than the platy so you will see it even less... Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't spend too much time on details. But before I can get to that, I have to do the retopologizing, UV unwrapping and normal map baking.

***

Having one fish made already was a blessing. I was able to reuse about half of the topology created for the platy. The fins had to go and the eye was in a wrong place, but most of the body shrinkwrapped easily enough. With the retopology done, I turned to the normal map. This one came out even better than the first one—I barely had to fix anything manually. So now it's just the matter of creating two more textures and placing the fish into the aquarium.

***

Phew, that was... unnecessarily long. It is bad enough to have two texture slots to mess up (diffuse and normal), but three... makes it even more likely. Twice I painted into a different texture than I wanted—luckily I noticed before I saved the changes. It cost me more time than I had hoped, but at least it is finally done. I tried to make tetra's fins nearly transparent, and I also experimented with Emission shader. However, no matter how little I mixed in, it still looked weird. The aquarium light will have to make it shiny enough.

***

And now the fish are happily swimming in the aquarium (or rather awkwardly suspended in mid-air. Shhh! Don't tell anyone). I'm not convinced that it is the best arrangement I can come up with but I'll let it settle down while I'm finishing the scene. Next week I'm going to add one more fish (zebra angelfish, most likely), and then I'll have a go at simulating the water. If everything goes well, I should be able to squeeze in a bit of post-processing, too, to polish things off. See you next week!