Project WIP: finish dat fish (Patreon)

Very happy with this! Now I can use it in the piece. Already layed out three positions, now I just need three different poses for them and I can continue with the arting.

But now, some workflow stuff. Took a bit longer than expected (mostly because I was confused about the nonstandard approach to making the eyes), hence no post yesterday.

So, the first step I did was to paint a simple black and white map as a mask for the dark and light skin colors. Literally just painted it on the model inside ZBrush, and the result is this:

Then I also needed some spots painted on, for surface variation. Painted something like this:

The spots are on a grey background because that's neutral, and I was going to use this map in a soft light/overlay/hard light type of blend mode, which only affects the underlying colors when its values are lighter or darker than mid grey.

Then I've also generated a bunch of procedural maps. NOTE: I don't use normal maps for characters (and whales) anymore, since it's much nicer to just do displacement with tessellation. The maps I needed were: the 1st and 3rd subdivision level displacement maps, two cavity masks, ambient occlusion, two peak/valley masks, SSS, and a UV mask. Here they all are:

Then I take all of these and composite them in various ways in Photoshop for the final looks. I decided to make more than just the two usual textures (diffuse and reflection maps) because:
a) I felt like it;
b) this fish went so much faster than expected I could spend more time on refining the shader.
The additional maps are roughness, and reflection glossiness. I also added procedural pores to the skin, only apparent at rendertime from up close. You can't really see them in the finished image on top of this post. XD

Anyway, the finished textures look like this:

NOTE: everything here is resized; the actual textures are 4096x4096 and 50mb each. XD

The diffuse texture is just what the name implies - the color of the reflected light, a.k.a. surface color. The reflection map controls the amount and color of reflections; the lighter the color, the more reflective the surface will be. Roughness and glossiness work in the same manner, but roughness affects the diffuse side, and glossiness affects the reflective one, and they both control the roughness of those elements. A more rough diffuse surface will seem more powdery (like velvet, suede, or rough wood), and the lighter the value, the more rough the surface will seem. Glossiness works the other way around - a white color will make the reflection mirror-sharp, and a black color will give us pretty much a more realistic diffuse surface.

And lastly, here's the shader setup:

The skin shader is assigned to the body and eyes, but the eyes are also duplicated to make a sorta glazing that has the other shader applied to it. That's how I always do eyes. Much more realistic than a simple textured sphere. Here, have a proof (also pardon the ultra-simple eye texture; it was of too little importance)...

Sphere:

Modified sphere with glazing:

So there you have it. How to make a humpback whale in like 4 days. Or so. Honestly can't remember. But it was super fast for a snail like me, and I love the result!

Now for a bonus! You know what's the best thing about humpback whales?

They look like that when you flip them upside down.

Enjoy! :D