Copper Fish

Published on 2 November 2026 at 14:36

A Copper fish, with realistic eyes to give it some character. 

Background

Another Class exercise, building on the foundations from the previous post, delving into baking and Shading in blender, as well as some re-topology.

 

Tools

This model started out as a sculpt sphere in the default sculpt file from Blender, Sculpting, Re-topologizing, UVing and Baking were all done using Blenders Default tools. Some Alphas were provided to use as stamps. 

Baking and Texturing was done in Substance 3D Painter. (While We had used this exercise to learn aboutbaking in Blender, after some point Blender refused to output any normals, even after an hour of trouble shooting, so I moved to substance instead.)

Challenges

The first challenge of this exercise was to get the stamp tool working. It was easy enough to get the texture loaded, and a new tool created, the difficulty was trying to get it so that it was stamping, and not dragging, Solved by setting the brush mode to Anchored.

The second challenge was Re-topology, Building a new lower resolution model to project detail onto. It was difficult orienting faces, and matching up the different key edge-loops (such as around the eyes and mouth). Manual Re-topology is also a rather time-consuming task, especially if deformations for animations need to be kept in mind.

Lastly, Baking the normal map, it sounds simple on paper, but trying to get it set up in blender to work correctly is difficult, and often times ended up throwing non-direct errors such as having a circular dependency if the image I was trying to bake was connected in the shader. 

Progression

Notes

I would like to look at advancing my knowledge of stamps and other types of brushes that can be made. 

Re-topology, both manual and automatic versions, would be an excellent skill to improve, I have a solid basis, but would like to improve it. Considering more complex structures and blends of shapes. 

I'm not overly happy with the eyes, but in the end-time restrictions caught up with me, The textures used were provided, and applied using the Node Wrangler Add-on.

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