Butchered Fish

Project

Today I’ll be talking about my process on Butchered fish – a model focused on organic details.
In this article, I’ll share my views on the difference between texturing hard surface stuff and how this experience can help one to ascend to another plane of texture painting.

Idea & Design

For a while, I wanted to make something meaty, bloody and most importantly organic. For me being a 3d artist is all about change, overcoming new problems (half of which you’ve caused yourself) and inventing new ways to prevail each and every time. After doing hard surface modeling for some time I grew weary of it and wanted to experience something else.

To make something awful and disgusting – well, in that case, I could have posted some Tolstoy or Dostoevsky books, but I didn’t want it to be too repulsive, so the bloody fish was my choice. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity to make a gory scene without tapping into the realm of questionable morals.

Plus I’ve designed a brief for myself which allowed me to experiment with my approach as a whole, forcing myself to actually make two fishes within a single project. That’s how the idea of a half-cut maritime animal came to be.

Of course, the first stage of any work is in looking up the references, no matter organic or not. I was lucky enough to stumble upon this article by Essentials Magazine about a newly opened fish butchery in Australia. The main reference shines in the center of my ref sheet – I like to draw my inspiration from a specific piece or a specific object and then use additional sources as auxiliary references.

Otherwise, if all of the images have the same priority it can become an unfocused mess really quickly.
Sure, there’s a ton of wiggle room for interpretation and creative expression, but boundaries as such are really helping me to contain my creative aspirations without splashing them around.

If you look closely, it becomes apparent that there are not only a bunch of photos but also a few paintings, namely Still Life with Fish, Sea Food and Flowers by Clara Peeters.
In my opinion, all art is about interpretation, in all its forms and mediums.

From my point of view, it absolutely doesn’t matter if it’s an oil painting on canvas or virtual triangles sparking in the darkness of an LCD display. None of these are the things it depicts, it’s rather a representation of the object itself.

Fish doesn’t exist on the canvas, it’s just brush strokes and lines, in the same manner, my model doesn’t exist and never did – it’s all just data bombarding pixels in a flat-screen display to command them to change the color. Even this text you’re reading now isn’t there, it’s just some tiny lights changing color and luminance.

And yet we as people are able to make sense of that informational noise, seeing patterns, grasping the sense of those blobs of paint on canvas and photons radiating from displays. That’s where I find reaching out to traditional arts really relevant and helpful – through the work of old masters it’s possible for the artists of today to interpret the world around and to get inspired.

I’ll give you an example – subsurface scattering depicted in this painting gave me the idea and literally showed me a blueprint not only of how it works, but what feeling it should convey to the viewer. Using this knowledge I was able to replicate the effect using SSS shaders, not by copying the work of art but by making something new out of it, to achieve the look I needed for this to work.

In general, it’s always a great idea to have a few reference sheets, and this is exactly what I did this time.
You see, for a long time there was no definition of the fish, it was just FISH, not even a specific species or something, there was not any detail or direction to move in.

After a brief exploration of the underwater world online I stumbled upon this fish and fell in love with it. Yes, it’s really that easy to seduce a man these days. As Mary Duhon likes to say: “To seduce a man, give him a fish. And that’s it, there’s no need to teach anyone to fish because it’s a devil’s gate to alcoholism and adultery”. I mean, look at this Bluefin Tuna!

It’s a big fish, it has a ton of detail, even more charisma and above all – it has a great online presence with literally thousands of photos and gazillions of videos about preparing it for cooking, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for. As per usual, the main reference is in the biggest fish in this vast ocean of references.

The other images greatly helped though. This species is particularly interesting due to the richness of its looks, contrasting, but not exotic coloring and only face structure. It is really easy to recognize which makes it a perfect candidate for the role of hero asset.

Putting meat on the matter

I really like sculpting. Although it’s REALLY easy to get carried away playing with it, losing the sense of proportions so they don’t add up or don’t make sense in general. I’m interested in CG as a whole, not in a specific niche.

Sure, career-wise it makes sense to focus on a specific scope of expertise to excel in it, although as a fan of the industry, I’ve always strived for EVERYTHING, for every aspect and every point of view which could help me build an understanding of 3d.

That’s why it’s always been easy for me to combine different techniques and approaches. How is this relevant here? The answer is very simple and floating on the surface: as the first act of creation of this asset I’ve made a crude approximation of the geometry based on the illustration from Wikipedia:

Sure, it doesn’t look like much at the moment, but it was a crucial step and a pivotal point for the whole project. Well, at this point, I’ve only started it, so there was not much to pivot, let’s say it was very important then! It’s an unorthodox way to start sculpting because we all know that truly great models are always getting their first history steps from a sphere or a cube.

But hey, the point of this is to get proportions right and not to screw it up from the earliest point, so this is the approach that’s giving me exactly what I’ve looked for.

Currently, the fish does not have eyes, mouth, or gills, it doesn’t even have its own ears, but that’s expected from a fish. This basic geometry was a great starting point for sculpting, so with ZBrush’s Dynamesh, I’ve been able to achieve everything I needed to.

At this stage, I was refining tiny fins, making a mouth and basically marking up all of the main and characteristical parts of the model:

Just a few marks and it starts to look like something! At this point, it’s important to note that in this particular case, I prefer to focus on big and medium shapes largely ignoring tiny details like scales.

This is not a model of printing, I don’t need super detailed scales or even the ability to generate a World Space Normal map from it, so it made more sense to paint all of that in Painter. It would give me much more creative control and the ability to tweak things by changing a single number instead of resculpting the whole model. With this mindset, this is what I’ve ended up with:

It’s not very different from the previous iteration, although parts and fins are better integrated into the body and most importantly – it’s ready to be made symmetrical.

You see, the initial plan was to make two versions – one with the cut on the left side and another is a complete and fully alive fish. To achieve that I needed to have the mesh perfectly symmetrical at the middle point, otherwise, two halves just wouldn’t fit when put together. A huge seam on the normals would pop up.

There’s a difference in there – the top one was the original sculpt and the one on the bottom – a rushly rolled-out fix because I’ve misinterpreted the references and put a tad more holes in this poor fishy than it is supposed to have. Of course, I noticed it after everything was baked and half of the model painted, but on fixing it – later.

A very perceptive reader could have noticed that on the references the bones taking a nosedive somewhere very deep into the meat and on the sculpted mesh it’s visibly on top of the rest of the mass. It’s not a coincidence and rather a stylistic choice to do it that way dictated by the workflow.

You see, if the aim was to make the anatomically correct version, then yes, the only way to do it would be as depicted on a variant underlined by a green line in the picture below.

In my case the main focus was the overall feeling and look, which allowed me some frivolous interpretation, making the ribs far more noticeable and visible on a small scale as shown in the tiny preview below. Plus geometry like that would pop up on bakes even more, making the final look exactly how I’ve envisioned.

With every 3D model, it’s crucial for me to make it feel like it’s real, convey the feeling that it has some weight and it’s not a hollow on the inside of origami. Sure, there’s literally only an outer shell present because
there’s no point in modeling stuff that wouldn’t be visible, but giving the viewer a feeling there’s something underneath the surface is always a good idea.

Especially with this asset, where all of the texturing is split in two parts, one of which is focused on the painting of the fish as a whole and another is specifically directed towards the intestines. With an approach like this there’s a great risk halves of the model would look too separated, so it’s important to integrate them with each other.

In hard surface modeling it’s easier to go away with it because it’s natural when different parts of the mechanism look separated just due to the way they were produced. In the case of an organic asset whole of the creature grows and develops simultaneously, there are no weld seams, attachments, or screws, so everything should look unified, a part of a single system, i.e. organic.

Fortunately, there’s a great way to do that by making the extensions of the outer parts inside and vice versa. In the case of the fish it was the fins and their muscles that served this purpose. Take a look at the green line which symbolizes the fin itself and the muscles it’s controlled by. The red area is the thickness of the tissue that’s being cut through, so it literally looks like a layered cake.

Because, you know, cutting the fish is not an organic process and it serves as a great contrast and almost like an intervention in the organic growth of the whole structure:

It’s like muscles growing through the outer shell itself. Well, it’s literally how it works and that’s why it is so important to incorporate and have it as a part of the sculpt in the first place. Notice how there’s no ridges anywhere – not on the fins, nor on the muscles.

It was done deliberately to have the freedom to make however many I’d wish, of any form or thickness, which would be a real hustle to change if it would be sculpted.

Trimming the fat with the machete

Since it is supposed to be a real-time model, the next stage had to be making a low poly version of it. I mean, these days 2 mil polygons are nothing, although rigging and texturing a mass this big would be a challenge. So, without further adieu let’s dive right into it.

For models like this I love to use Retopoflow – an awesome addon for Blender which is taking complete control over the software with its own layout and set of rules. It’s like Topogun on steroids! This piece of software helps to speed up the workflow in unimaginable ways giving complete creative freedom to artists.

Sure, it is tailored for sub-D workflow, but nothing can stop the user from applying it as a main driver behind low poly modeling, including a bazillion of N-gons. The principle is simple: there’s a high poly mesh which is acting as a snapping target and there are polygons that the user can pinch, drag, make stripes of them and circumvent around the model, and it’s even possible to do it very sloppily since merging in this addon is very snappy.

Important note: since this model is supposed to be rigged and deformed, it’s crucial to have enough edge loops to do so, that’s why there’s so much geometry. Besides bending parts, like the tail and places where fins attach to a body, the important area is the eye. That’s because people tend to notice eyes in and faces in general before everything else, so it makes sense to put more effort and poly budget in these areas.

Nobody wants to see an angular shape of the eye, it is supposed to be round!

Sure, your geometry is as good as your UV’s just because texel density is resting upon them. As well as the overall creative availability of the asset. It’s just building a playground, really – the more thought you put into it, the better the final result would be.

My secret ingredient to success was a ton of overlapping on both versions of the fish. It effectively got me x2 texel density compared to the non-overlapped version. You know, exactly the thing we’re doing while making hard surface models.

Check out the image below. Highlighted islands are those which overlap.

As it’s clearly visible, I’ve allowed myself a bit of an overlap leakage just to have an extra oomph of non-symmetry not compromising overall texel density in a big way. It really gave me the opportunity to integrate the outer shell with the intestine one, adding wear and tear in the place of the cut and a few blood drops alongside smears along the way. Obviously, to make a whole fish symmetrical again I had to mirror it.

But then a hole in the UVs would pop up in a place where the inside area was mapped to. So UV’s had to be reshuffled again. Fortunately, we’re living in the future, so it was done using a magic spell called UV Packmaster with the projecting of the strokes in Painter.

Making changes never was so easy! And not a single pixel gone wasted. Plus, since I’m using a brand new USD workflow, which was added in Painter 8.3.0, exchanging the files became blazingly fast: it’s almost like a USD with a gazillion polys getting written and read faster than native formats of different software. It’s fascinating, I highly recommend you switch to it ASAP.

Scaly monsters and nice sprites

I’m joking, there are no sprites or billboards in this project. Everything is done with the standard metal/rough workflow without even a droplet of opacity. Well, I suppose you can call it a Roughness workflow since there are no metal parts in the fish. At least not on this one. Anyways, let’s get into the thick of it – the texturing.

As with everything, it’s better to think and plan before doing any texturing, especially if it involves painting. Besides, I don’t gather references for anything, and I’ll be damned to squeeze most of them just because I’ve spent hours searching for the perfect ones and watched a bazillion videos where people prepared fish for cooking.

And as if it wasn’t enough, I contacted my friend who works in a restaurant and asked her to film the fish from some specific angles for this project.

So yeah, it’s time for observation! In the image below you can see how the main color spots were transferred from a reference to corresponding spots on the model. It was the earliest stage of the job. I find it really useful to mark up everything as early as possible, without putting too much detail in, just to have a feeling that these parts are in place.

The red line is encircling the light blue leaking tone which is blending the black top part of the fish with the rest of the body; the yellow circle is a characteristic yellow lining bluefin tuna has, and the green one is a blue belly line, which is not present on the early stages, but clearly visible in the final version.

The important thing here is to make it feel organic and interconnected. There are no different parts, they didn’t grow separately, even the fins which are seemingly a part of the model in its own regard are well integrated and inseparable from the body.

The same idea should transcend to texturing, and it doesn’t always happen. People assume texturing of the organic stuff is too different from the texturing of hard surface assets, although 99% of techniques are absolutely the same. Well, this number may sound a bit high, let’s say it’s 98.5%.

Procedural vs Hand Painted

The great Andrew Kramer once said: “More keyframes means more problems”.
We’re not in the monograph realm here, but the truth springs out from the dimension of procedural texturing.
Having such an awesome tool like Substance 3D Painter with its robust support of procedural effects makes it a no-brainer when it comes to using them alongside painted stuff.

I’m old enough to remember when the biggest and the most versatile tool for texturing on the market was Foundry’s Mari, which heavily relied on painting. And then, when Substance Painter was released in 2014 the industry changed, forcing even the most popular tools to incorporate procedural instruments. Sure thing, nobody wants to do more work where it
can be automated and easily controlled by a few numbers instead of painstakingly repainting everything and everywhere.

Take a look at the scales, as the most obvious example: it would take a lifetime of effort to draw or sculpt every single one of them. With a procedural approach I’ve been able to use some alpha with scales that I’ve been using for well over a decade, project it from a cylinder and voila – all the pieces fell in place. To make it less uniform all I had to do was to make
a map with only a few scales present and it gave me a RandomOdd Scale layer mask which does exactly what the name implies – it’s adding a few brighter scales here and there.

In reality, different scales rotated slightly differently – it would be nice to have, but in real time we can’t afford specific shaders like this for everything. So, a bunch of fakeroo is a way to go as per usual in computer graphics. That’s why those odd scales are also less rough than the rest, so they can shine a bit brighter when the light is getting on them. The same approach is used with the odd yellow scales – the only thing different is the offset of the mask. As a final stroke some dark, possibly missing or damaged scales are added with exactly the same technique and everything is slightly sprinkled by the highlight on each element, so the feeling of three-dimensionality would be conveyed even better. Sure, it looks nice and dandy, albeit a bit predictable and repeatable.

That’s when painting comes into place. With the mask applied to all the scales, it’s really easy to control where and how they would appear. This way everything will stay procedural, at the same time retaining painterly qualities and complete creative control. To be honest, most of the time what

I’m doing is painting the masks, so the software definitely should have rather been called Substance 3D Mask Painter, but apparently is too long and not as catchy, so they had to trim the most important part.

Same as the fish itself grew organically to become an adult animal with all its different parts and organs, intertwined and linked to each other, the same should happen in the attempt to replicate this effect during texturing. Let’s not waste any time and move on to another example, which is less obvious but very valuable and really was a way to save a lot of time.

Take a look at those washed-out blue patterns on the gills and the head:

They are completely procedural. The only function of the Paint layer here is to limit the zone of influence of this mask. In other aspects, it’s just a Curvature map with the slapped-on-top copy with a slightly different Balance value, which serves as a Subtract mask making a cutout of the shape.
With just a few clicks I can change the look of this zone depending on the artistic input or just make different versions of textures on the spot. Getting iterative is really easy with this kind of approach, so the best practice is to use procedural and manual techniques hand in hand.

Especially productive collaboration between these two is happening when it’s needed to make procedural parts less uniform using the painted input. It’s a really easy step to go through although I’ve seen so many times when artists don’t do this and it’s visible from a mile away, which is breaking the illusion of the asset being organic completely.

Of course, the approach does depend on the specific situation. In the area nearby I needed to add some wrinkles near the fins, which is clearly visible in the referencing pictures and it’s pretty logical for fish to be wrinkled in the place where it all bends. This time I needed complete control over the shape of it, so it was easier to use Stencil from a Wrinkle’s alpha which is at the bottom of the image below.

Just a few strokes seemed to get the job done and now the fish has visible results of their organic functionality on it. Basically, the idea is to mix approaches and do whatever fits the most in this specific instance.
Different tasks require different approaches, so the ability to interchange them and take advantage of each is the key.

There are a lot of layers put down via painting exclusively, to name a few:

Some of those lines are tightly controlled, like highlights to convey the specific purpose they’ve designed for.
Mother nature gave us all the tools we need, all of the detail on the references and it’s up to us as artists to see and utilize all of that.
As Matthew Merkovich once (well, repeatedly) said: ‘Nature gave us enough tracking points already, there’s no need to add additional dots for tracking”.

With texturing it’s even more true than with tracking. Everything is laid down like a blueprint, it just takes a bit of understanding and concentration to see it.

The eye of the beholder

Another thrilling and intricate part of making this asset was texturing of the eye.

As I said earlier, the eyes are a really eye-catching part of anybody or an asset, if it has any, so it is important to approach making of them extremely scrupulous, starting with the sculpting, transcending this effort to retopo and then ascending it all together via texturing.

As evident from the animation above, the eye is catching reflections in some specific way, breaking the rules of physics just a little bit, to give an impression of depth without adding unnecessary geometry or shaders.

But how does it work? First, we have to understand how the eyes work and why they do it in this particular way.

Here’s a fabulous schematic from the personal archive of Mary Duhon. Used with permission:

There are a few things to clear up. The first and most important part is the highlight at the bottom of the iris – it is caused by caustics cast down by the cornea. This area is encircled in red. The iris itself is an area woven from tissue, it’s literally one beautiful striped muscle with a hole in its center which we know as the pupil (blue circle).

Because of the way it is built, the pupils are almost never perfectly circular, they’re always wobbled a bit. It’s a tiny detail, but it will come in handy when it’s all about tiny details such as this. The purple lines signify the dark outline outside of the iris which is giving some contrast compared to the light sclera and serves as an organic bridge between those two areas.
The orange zone on the scheme is a slight gradient from the iris to the corners of the eyes, which is literally its own shadow of the sclera since the surface is somewhat rotating from the center. Last, but not least is the specular highlight signified in yellow.

Sure, in PBR workflow you wouldn’t want to paint it, but it’s important to be aware of the properties of the material to achieve the same effect.

Now, knowing and noticing every mentioned aspect, how could it be translated to PBR material? Glad you’ve asked, here are a few easy steps to achieve a similar look and take into account all of those intricacies. As per usual – the result is in the left column, the layer stack at the center and the mask of the layer at the right.

Everything is happening in the masking layer, so that’s why it’s important to show it. At first, I had a basic uniformly filled layer of very muddy color and a basic level of roughness.

What I did next was putting the pupil on the model.
I find it’s much easier to stamp big easily noticeable details first and fill in gaps with details later.

Very important step – adding fake caustics where it should be cast.

That’s just a fill with the warm fill color set to Color Dodge – this setup is allowing me to change the underlying color if necessary without the need to adjust the color of the highlight itself. The mask could be done procedurally, but in this instance, it was painted, because it was just more convenient.

Sure, it’s a PBR workflow, so painting highlights is an unorthodox approach here, but since I’m faking the shader itself, it’ll do fine. The important part is not to overdo it, although it applies literally to everything.

The next in the menu is a layer to simulate a smooth gradient on the sclera.
This is literally an AO generator with a slight painting adjustment.

After that, I added an outer circle to the iris, because the necessity to reinforce it became clear. The idea was to make it almost like the iris itself is bent inwards so these parts catch the light in a specific way looking like it’s sparkling.
Notice the tiny lines at the bottom of the mask – I’ve added them to make fibers in the iris a bit more noticeable and the area more rich and packed with detail.

The next stage is similar to the previous one, but this time I’m putting down the actual fibers of the iris. These days it’s extremely simple – I just had to put some Stripes into a fill layer and use it as a spherical projection.

With some manual adjustment as well as a tad of Blur Slope to add some irregularities it turned out to be like this:

Sure, the main Eye group’s mask is limited to the eye area itself, so it ended up being very contained and tidy.

The final and least noticeable touch was adding a layer that would push the bottom of the iris on the Height channel. It’s necessary, so when light is moving, in a certain position iris would catch a specular reflection or two, conveying the feeling of the iris being concave.

And that’s it! Let’s compare it to the references in the same fashion:

It is EXACTLY like the human eye which I did the breakdown of above, except this one does belong to a fish with corresponding differences in shape, proportions and color.
You see, that’s the tricky part of artistry – being able to reference some phenomena, understand it, and use newly gained knowledge to your advantage.

It definitely shouldn’t restrict the artist, but rather quite the opposite – combining and mixing approaches and techniques is always a welcome addition to any workflow.

That’s why there are blood smears on the cut-open version of the fish.

I’m really fond of the idea of adding the feeling of three-dimensionality with something that is breaking the ideal shape of the eye, so it looks almost like there’s a layer of cornea above the iris and this is where weathering occurs.

It’s exactly the same approach I’ve used on my Vanguard Citicar project, an article on which you can find here.
This is another example of how hard surface and organic workflows aren’t so different and approaches from one can greatly aid the other.

As you can see, it’s always a good idea to understand why, how and what are you doing, so even when it’s about the fish, references to a totally different species could be useful, one just has to know where to look at, not blindly copying everything.

HUGE GUTS

Same as with the eye, understanding is still the most important part of any process.
It all looks complicated and intertwined, and it definitely is, but by dividing the object into smaller parts it’s much easier to grasp the essentials of its look. I’ve ended up dividing it into 8 groups, here’s the breakdown:

Each of these isolated groups represents some specific areas that have its own distinguished material. Of course, it doesn’t stop the occasional spillage of the material here and there, like puddles of blood, for example.

Though names are self-evident and pretty clear, I think it’s important to explain the logic behind each group:

• Deep Level Dark Blood – This is a group containing the darkest deoxygenated blood, which makes a good contrast to a lighter background. Also, it is pretty spectacular to look at in moderate quantities.
• Yellow Fascia – the outer shape of the ribcage, literally the outer lighting tissue which is encasing all of the intestines
• Meat Cut Sideways – the profile of the fish, so to speak. It’s the area that goes against organic growth because, well, it was interrupted by the knife cutting through it.
• Bones Master folder – there’s a ton of intricacies and nuances of the bone texturing and all of that is in this folder. Basically, it’s the spline and ribs.
• Fins – fin muscles that visually connect outer fin planes to the internal structure
• Ribcage – everything which is inside the ribcage and underlying the bone structure in this particular case.
• Rim – a base meat structure to add the feeling of the fish being layered. Mostly used in the outer lining of the shape of the cut.
• Fat – every fish has some and it’s clearly visible when the flesh is cut. It’s a very thin light-yellow stripe, but it’s nice to have anyway.

It’s clear there’s nothing too complex in this structure, but it helps to keep the workspace organized. It’s always a nice idea to organize your project logically, so it’s easy to find wherever you’re looking for.

The Onion Rings

The most interesting and recognizable part of any meat is of course its onion rings. It’s literally a representation of different layers, almost like the rings on a tree stump. I’m not sure it’s possible to estimate the age of the meat from the number of those layers, but it looks cool nonetheless.
In this particular case it was really easy to simulate them, by just taking an image with a gradient positioned radially around the center. This setup allowed me to control the balance of the mask, literally giving me the ability to tweak and affect the hardness and visibility of those lines.

After that, the only thing I had to do was bent the circle to a desirable shape using Warp projection. To me, as someone who has been doing texturing for a while and started drawing textures on top of UV snapshots in Photoshop, it’s absolutely fascinating to have the ability to manipulate every single projection in 3D space exclusively.
A sudden realization dawned on me that I haven’t used 2D view even in Painter in quite a while just because everything is in fully fledged 3D now.

What’s really important at this point is to remember how cool and precise computers are, how they need an extra push, an additional input to make even a simple thing like this more organic and grown-like. In other words – to make it wobble.

There’s no better tool for that than a Blur Slope node. With some experimenting, it fruited the settle distortion along all of the fibers, which is exactly what I’ve been after.

The inner cause of external force

The muscles on the inside are particularly interesting to me because it’s a clear and unaltered extension of the outer shell.

It’s very clear that part on the inside makes the outer fin move, it’s almost like a story of a cause and effect crammed into this tiny corner of the fish. I wanted to do it “right”, so since an image with a bunch of stripes was used on the fins itself, to make those bluish lines, I’ve used the same fill layers here.

It allowed me to match patterns perfectly making it feel like it is truly a single organic object, like if tendons really do extend into the fin itself.

Another subtle part of the muscle is a darker spot in the center – it added to the feeling of the muscle being a bit thicker and dense closer to the center, plus visually it’s much more entertaining to look at this smooth gradient rather than at a solid color.

At this point I’ve realized that I made a terrible mistake analyzing the references: in my mind the rib cage area was encircled by the crevices which is exactly where the muscles for the back fin should be placed.

Fortunately, it was really easy to fix High Poly and Low Poly versions thanks to the ability of Painter to reproject the strokes to another version of the geometry. All I had to do was to resculpt the fish and then to remade the lowpoly. Oh, and to repack all of the UV islands. Piece of cake!
But seriously tho, it’s important to find and fix mistakes ASAP and I’m glad that it is so easy these days. Otherwise, it would be a disaster and issues would pile up just like a snowball does.

The underlying structures

Probably the most expected and obvious layer of all of them in this one. It looks kinda like a salmon slice but rather colored like crab sticks.

Sure, it’s really hard to find crab sticks in the fish, because:

a) it’s not a crab;

b) fishes don’t have sticks; c) crab sticks aren’t real. In the case of this project this material was used as a backdrop, to add some detail where other dedicated layers would fail to do so.
It’s sort of a fallback, a SafeNet to create an illusion of complexity and presence of the intricate details.

This layer goes hand in hand with the Fat one. And if you look closely, there’s a tiny stripe of the outer shell peaking out, or rather peaking in the cut area, to better blend in the outer and inner realm of this asset.
Visual richness is always an important part of any visual art, especially in entertainment, because the main purpose of graphics like this is, well, to entertain and be interesting to look at.
Over the years I’ve discovered one simple trick which would greatly help with that: it’s painting down some areas on the opposite color.

In this instance, I’ve added some simple Curvature masks with the bluish fill layer set to Overlay. And look at the result:

Sure, it became slightly darker and grimmer, but as long as it doesn’t interfere with the main idea behind the asset, its own story of how it came to be, it’s ok.
Some people in the comments section asked me why I didn’t make it tasty looking, but rather chose a nastier path – well, that was the briefing I gave to myself, and this ended up pretty much what I wanted to do.

The other commenter shamed me for putting a fish on display, as if it was a real creature, and started arguing how a vegetarian wouldn’t ever do this.

People are strange, and even when commenting on a CGI everybody’s having their own hidden motives and peculiar views, so it’s no use to take everything personally. That’s another lesson for the day, I guess.

Fake depth of character

Another cool trick up my sleeve is using separate layers as adjustment layers. For example, in this instance I’ve needed to blur a whole group: all of its channels and the mask at the same time. I couldn’t do it in the group itself, because there are two different stacks for it, resulting in the necessity to have 2 Blur nodes, which is not what I wanted.
In that case,the  solution came into the assigning Blur filter to a new fill by setting the layer to Passthrough blend mode. That way I could control everything with just a single node.

Also, this effect was a requirement to give a feeling of those thin bones being somewhere deep in the flesh like it’s blurred by what’s on top of them.

The light, crawling under the skin

It’s rarely used in hard surface modeling, especially in real-time graphics, just due to the technical limits of the processing power, although subsurface scattering is a crucial shader to have in organic models. Besides, it’s a portfolio piece, so I can let myself do whatever I want. I like to do the SSS part in the eleventh hour, just because it is not distracting from the rest of the show.
With so many plates spinning at once it’s always a good idea to limit your focus to a specific purview, because otherwise it’s really hard to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

So, that’s what my Scattering map looks like:

I’ve intended to use the same color map for SSS as for the diffuse, so the scattering radius is the only thing I’m here for. There’s nothing worse than a semi-transparent object with nothing inside – no bones, no veins, no nothing.

That’s why it is so important to take your time and insert all those details on a scattering map. It adds a fresh coat of polish to the model, plus puts a bit of realism in the rendering as well.
You may ask: “Well, why would I have all of that hustle, do I really need SSS in my project?”, and it’s a valid concern. Take a look at the comparison below (SSS value multiplied for the illustrative purposes):

Sure, the variant without SSS has its own look but in this project, it was not a desirable outcome. Fins should glow and be kinda transparent because that’s the property of the flesh I’m here after.
That’s not even to mention the additional artistic freedom in expression and rendering of this stuff that SSS is giving.

Sweat, tears, blood and a cutting board

The great part of this project was the depiction of blood. It was done in a semi-procedural way, in which the painted masks were used to paint a lighter underlying layer and then the anchor of the same mask was pushed up and sideways via Blur Slope. It’s a bit of a cheating and non-orthodox approach to PBR workflow.
Usually, it’s a big no-no to draw highlights directly on the base color. But hey, rules are here to be bent, and this is exactly what I’ve done. The result is fantastic, just look at this dynamic system that can be adjusted with a flick of a single switch!

People say this blood looks like strawberry jam. Well, maybe they are right, but I like it exactly this way. With the amount of masking I’m using it may seem that every layer is three masks in a trenchcoat.

Welp, this is exactly what it is, and the best part, of course, is that it could be edited with ease in a completely non-destructive fashion. It’s the best thing, in, like, ever!

Another interesting part of this technique is the procedural shift of the mask based on the Position map. I learned this trick form Wes McDermott’s tutorial, here it is:

I mean, look at this, it’s sensational! It truly feels like we’ve been living in the dark ages until Wes dawned on us with his wisdom and as Prometheus brought the fire to humanity.
That changed my texturing process forever.

Don’t smear or it will get worse

Fortunately, in this case, I needed it to get worse. The other half of The Blood duo is Blood Smeared. It’s easy to guess what it’s for from the name – I’ve made it to simulate a very thin layer of blood across the fish, board and knife.
The principle is extremely simple – there’s a lighter layer with the mask which is feeding to the anchor, and this anchor is filling for the mask of the layer above, which is a darker version of this one.

Take a look on it in the action:

Magnificent, isn’t it? This system is very flexible and is allowing me to influence it utilizing the pen pressure – the more I push, the darker the area does become.
The top layer is masked by the Anchor, levels of which are slightly skewed, to give it less coverage than the original mask has.

Take a look at the picture below; the green area is the layer of dark blood.

This material is extremely simple, although extremely effective. It sounds like a motto, so I’m striving to follow it in every aspect of my work.

The eleventh hour is over now, the clock is striking twelve.

The fish is finished. What’s now then? I had to render and prepare it for the presentation. Sure, it could be done in a neutral studio-like environment, which is the path I usually follow, but it seems to be too boring. After all, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and effort on this asset, so it would be a wise move to put up a show for it to shine.
Of course there’s no better way to do it, than to make two more assets: the cutting board and some very fancy knife to do, well, cutting with it.

I knew I wanted to do something simple, but charismatic, definitely with a sunflower on it. After searching for a bit, I stumbled upon a beautiful handmade cutting board by:

While it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, the burned pattern was absolutely stunning.
Besides, this work provided a good real-life reference of burned wood which allowed me to grasp the essentials of its look.  Of course, this project required a different story for the asset, so I ended up making three versions of it.

A new one, a used one, and a bloody overused board with blood stains all over the place:

Getting iterations with careful planning is really easy: to render three different sets of maps I just had to disable corresponding folders and viola – it looks like three different assets. Nonetheless, weathering always feels like a cheat code – it helps to hide most of the mistakes and to make an asset an interesting object to look at. The problem arises when people are getting too reliant on it because it’s so easy to dirt things up with Substance Painter.
My philosophy and working ethics is that assets should look good before adding wearing and marks of active usage. It should be a spice, not a whole dish. After all, in this instance, I’m making a cutting board, not the wear and tear separated from it.

There’s definitely some stuff to pay close attention to while making a foundational, barebone version of the asset.
In this particular instance, it’s quite clear that the board consists of three wooden planks. It’s natural for the planks to be slightly different – after all, it’s not an ideally correct mathematical model of them; it’s a real deal with its own imperfections, wobbles, and differences in tone, but most importantly – with the different fibers forming mesmerizing patterns on their sides.

It’s literally like fingerprints, but a wood version. If Wood had a passport, they’d definitely put fiber prints in it for easier identification.
So it is very important to take it into account and project different patterns on different segments of the asset. I’ve altered the tone and color of each, so it would literally look like different pieces glued together. The left board is unaltered, and the right one is incorporating the aforementioned differences, take a look:

The difference is astounding as they say. At this stage, I’ve rated the result as acceptable and moved to the actual weathering. In this case there was no dust, or discoloration from the sunlight, it was mostly hand-painted cuts, chip offs and other traces of cutting on this board.
Most of them were projected from the Leaks maps from Starter Assets in Painter, with careful moderation and a very thorough thought process on why and how everything is placed.

Basically, I had to think like a knife – where to put each and every cut.

You haven’t heard of the revolution?

Anchors revolutionized texturing workflow, so now we can pack a multitude of temp masks into a single stack, overriding each level over and over again.
Then the result of those experiments could be composed on top of the same stack using Anchors.

Here are 4 levels of complexity, 4 different masks, in the sense

Take a look at this example:

Let’s take a closer look, shall we? I have this complicated pattern on the blade of the knife, so it will make a perfect case study.
This first group of layers allowed me to make a hair-like mask and then – blur it upwards using Position as a guideline.

Then it was time for a Grunge map which would override all of the previous input, since it’s set to Normal blend mode.

Fortunately, with Anchors, it is extremely easy to bring details back and overlay them using Linear Burn.
With a bit of manual painting and masking off the desired parts, it started to look like this:

Looks great! Although, since it’s a mask for a smooth highlight on the body of the blade, I needed to blur it a bit and then subtract the sharp version of it.
And with Anchors it’s possible!

Back in the day, when this feature wasn’t implemented, users were doomed to use like a bazillion separate layers with temp masks to perform all these operations.

It was a dark time, but thanks to the efforts of the Substance team we’re living in a better future, allowing creativity to thrive.

The lights of the big city

As a final step on the long and complicated way of completing this project, I’ve finally reached the stage of rendering. It’s always a lot of fun to do because it’s like having a Lego set – you have all the necessary parts already, and the only thing you have to do now is to tell the story.
That’s why I like to put dozens of renders from different angles. I mean, I’ve spent weeks making this model, it makes sense to show it from any conceivable angle! I’m using Blender’s Eevee for animation and Cycles for static rendering as my main drivers. Cycles X is so fast these days that I can use it even for animation, but I don’t want to wait for more than a second for a single frame.
Back in the day, when computers were slow and render engines weren’t so blazingly fast, it could take weeks just to output a simple turntable in a decent resolution.

These days I can’t even take a coffee break, because it’s happening extremely fast. Like, I’ve rendered something around 3000 frames in 20 minutes!

Plus in Blender it’s really easy to switch between real-time and fully-raytraced renderers, not in a single click, but with a single flick, simultaneously having the ability to control the pose of the bones of the model.
Even 10 years ago it would seem to be some kind of fantasy from a pompous sci-fi movie picture, and now it’s our daily driver. I like to live in the future!

No reason in particular why I’m using Blender except it’s AWESOME, no cap.

I’ve suddenly realized there are no post-effects, post-editing, and even color correction is absent. Back in the day, I would spend hours and sometimes days composing and enhancing render, but now I didn’t even think about it.
That’s telling something about the state of the tools which do allow us to achieve the necessary result directly in the viewport.

Closing thoughts

I could go on and on about the lessons this fish taught me whispering with its deep cozy voice into my ear, but as Da Vinci said – Art is never finished, only abandoned.
The same thing happened with the project itself – I had to stop somewhere, otherwise I could iterate on it forever and with each time it would become slightly better.

While writing this article I thought of a bazillion ways how this model could be improved and enhanced, but that’s how the process of growing is working.
Self-reflection is an important part of personal and professional growth, and I recommend it to everyone.

The bottom line of the article is this: there is no difference between modeling hard surfaces and organic objects, since the principles are the same as with texturing EVERYTHING, it’s just important to not get too comfy with the specific way and be ready to use all of your knowledge to achieve the desired look on the particular project.

As a current resident of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, I’m typing these words under the accompaniment of explosions and the threat of a missile attack.

In the past year the most popular soundtrack out there is air raids which are ringing all the time, sometimes 15 times a day, other days we’re having just a few. All of that is adding its own weight of complications and pressure to the creative process.

Despite all those horrors and cruelty I’ve still been able to find time and desire to make this project and write an article on it. I think that’s a great example of how it is possible to do what you want in any circumstances, under any pressure or external conditions.
It’s really important to be precious with what you have at the moment, even if it’s something as ethereal and hard to fathom as safety because you never know when it will abruptly end.

My love goes to GamesArtist.co.uk – thank you, guys, for letting me tell my story – it’s always a pleasure to write for you!

Where to find even more of me:

https://blenderartists.org/u/ostapblender/summary

https://www.artstation.com/ostap_blender

https://www.instagram.com/bohdanlvov/

https://sketchfab.com/ostapblendercg

https://www.facebook.com/Ostap.Blender/

https://peoplemaking.games/@ostapblender

https://www.reddit.com/user/ostapblender

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