Skinning a fish
Yep, it's me again. Thanks to all of you, the fish is textured and such. But I seem to have backed myself into a corner... biting off a bit more than I can chew. Cause I have to animate this fish. You'll notice as per the screenshot it has fangs (don't ask why, I can't tell you : ) and eyeballs that are seperate meshes. What you can't see is that there is also a fur attached (yes, like, a hairy fish) and barnacles that I geopainted onto it's surface (currently hidden).
Now, I've begun to figure out the basics of smooth binding and skin painting, so skinning the base mesh is no problem, though I'm sure with more experience and better edge flow I could get the deformations to look a whole lot better. But, a few issues.
1) The skeleton attached seems to make sense to me, since that's kinda what a fish spine looks like anyway, traveling down the lateral line. But to IK a skeleton, it's supposed to have some kinda default curvature. This curvature makes the fish only bend vertically (something it shouldn't do...) when I need it to articulate left and right.
2) how do I get the fur, eyes, fangs, and barnacles to follow the base mesh?
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Peter Srinivasan
Producer