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How to build the Perfect Fish

Travis Lackey
3500 sw 119th
Oklahoma City, OK 73170
http://www.angelfire.com/de/TravelingFire/

TravelingWater@hotmail.com
http://www.angelfire.com/de/TravelingFire/
TravelingWater@hotmail.com

This is a tutorial on how to build the Perfect, PhotoReal Fish in Lightwave. First, start with a photo. The easiest fish in the world to make are flat fish, like Butterfly, Angel, Surgeon fish, and as most of these sport fantastic tropical colors, they're a real joy to work with. This article lines out the "Box Modeling" technique, which in my opinion is far superior to other meathods, as it keeps poly counts low (for faster render times) and builds a perfectly clean mesh if done correctly. So, let's begin... Load your fishy pic into the background of the left view field (defaults bottom right). It's under the Display Utility. Resize it to fill the majority of the window. It should look like the above picture, with maybe some of the grid showing. But not much!

Now, go to the box tool, select it, and draw a narrow box as shown above. Go to the front Viewport, and pull it into 3D, but don't make it any thicker than the box is wide. Next, go back to the Left viewport, select the right side face, and make sure that's the only face selected. Press [shift] F (the smooth-shift hotkey) and pull the box out. Using Bevel will twist your faces back and forth, and make a general mess. Press H and resize the new face slightly to fit the narrowing shape of the body of the fish. Don't worry about shaping out the dorsal or ventral fins, those come later. It should look something like below...

Continue this step all the way down the body, and through the tail, as below.

Now, go back to your first box, select the left face, and do the same thing, going towards the head of the fish.

Ok, you've got the fishy body done. Now you need to flesh out the details. First, select the polys along the side of the fish you've made, from tail to mouth. Use the bandsaw tool to place 3 new cuts along the side of the fish. You might have to play with the vertices to get them to arch properly, you want a smooth, arching transition, for best results.

Take the bottom arch down as close to the bottom of the pectorial fin as possible, and the top arch close to the top of the eye.

Now, select the 3 polys on the mouth side of the fish, deselect the middle one, and smooth-shift the top and bottom lip out to form the fishy mouth. Next, pull out the main fins, with the exception of the dorsal fin. That one needs special care. To pull out the bottom fin, select all the polys that take up that part of the model, (6-8 faces, ususally) and smooth-shift it out as one piece.

Next, we will bandsaw the bottom ventral fin twice, to make small side faces for the spikes coming out of the front of the fin.

Lastly, select the top polys that make up the dorsal fin. Smooth-shift them out until they're at the base of the spikes. Now the fun starts. Wherever a spike is, select the face underneith it (make sure you only get the top poly, no the sides) and pull the think up and size it into a spike. Use the Tug Vertex comand ([control] t) to shape it. When you have all your spikes done correctly, take the fish into a photo editing program and crop the picture down to the size of the fish. We're now making a Texture for our fish! In Lightwave, rename the finished polys (q) to whatever you want, go into the texture tool ([control] 3) and use your newly cut fishy texture as a Planar map on the Z axis. If it looks funny, try the X axis. =D Copy your layer, and paste it in the bump and specuarity channels too. You're done with a basic fish! You can of course add details like the side fins, gils and eyes if you want your fish to be REALLY close to the camera, but for a general shot, this fish will do you just fine. Congrads!!