Noroff fagskole: M4 - Sculpting and retopoing a fish

 This week at Noroff, I am sculpting a fish in Zbrush, then retopoing it in Maya.

Time-budget

 Idea Development

This is my mood-board. I chose to sculpt a white marlin. 

Work

I used the bottom right picture for reference, since I couldn't really find any proper side-views of the real fish itself.

In Zbrush, I started off with a simple sphere.

 I then proceeded with sculpting the main parts.

Here, I had gotten the entire fish sculpted

But it still needed some work.

Below are the rest of the pictures I gathered throughout the sculpting.

I imported the sculpted fish to Maya, where I firstly did a mirror cut.

Then I mirrored it. Now, I had two separate pieces completing the fish. 

I made one of the two parts live, and started drawing quads. 

After quite some work, this was the result:

As you can see here, the eyes are different objects. 

I had a lot of problems quad drawing this fish.

The first time I tried quad drawing the fish, 4 hours of work completely disappeared because of one little mistake, which I'm not even really sure what was.

The second time, I was annoyed and tired, so I tried doing it as fast as possible. This ended up looking horrible, and would definitely not get accepted.

Third time, even with some issues, I used my time properly and managed to complete it.

Third time's the charm.

But it's worth to tell that the most difficult part of this was the mouth. Instead of turning on x-ray for the fish, I changed the transparency to make it transparent. Working on an area where there are quads drawn all over is really difficult. But, after turning on x-ray instead of using transparency, it was easier to work with.

So with this retopoing, I managed to go from 129 968 verts to 878 verts for the low-poly and 3446 verts for the smoothed model.

Sculpted model

Retoped model (Low-poly)

Retoped model (Smoothed)

FP

Lastly, I created two shotcams. Two clay renders for the sculpted model and two clay renders with wireframe for the retoped model.

Render settings:

Vray

1920x1080

This weeks assignment was more difficult than i originally thought. I burned my self a lot, and used more time than planned. But, I think the end result looks good and I am happy with the result.