Grilled Fish

Goals

My goal was to work on a small personal project since I’m usually starting with more ambitious projects, then get distracted very easily, lose motivation and never finish them – which is really frustrating. So this little prop was a perfect fit for me in size and amount of work.

With this project, I also wanted to broaden my portfolio and push my hand-painting skills further.

Software

• Blender
• 3DCoat
• Photoshop

References & Concept

As already mentioned, I wanted to work on something small so I went to Artstation and found this nice grilled fish prop on one of Jourdan Tuffans concepts.
Then I looked for further references to get a better understanding of each element and put them into my mood board.

A small disclaimer in advance: I wouldn’t have thought that I would get the chance to write an article so I didn’t prepare any high-quality work-in-progress shots and had to take screenshots out of my recordings. My apologies – but I will attach a link to my timelapse video at the end of this article if you’re interested you can watch my texturing process there.

Modeling & UVs

I went straight into Blender and modeled it as shown in the concept. For the fish, I did a rough sculpt to get the base shape and then I quickly started the retopo to get my low poly mesh. I usually do this for organic objects since it’s easier for me to move vertices around.

For the details, I also kept in mind that I can duplicate some elements after texturing, so I modeled only two cylinders for the lemons and four planes for the herbs to save some UV space and time. After finishing the model I unwrapped every part of it as is known by default. The most important part here was to make sure that the texel density is even across the whole mesh.

Texturing

First of all, I imported the mesh into 3DCoat and applied some base colours with the fill tool on one layer.

When all objects were filled with colour, except the herbs, I created another layer for the next step. Starting with the cutting board I applied lighter colours to the faces on top which are facing the light source and darker colours to the faces that are turning away, like the sides and the bottom.

At this stage, I tried to keep the brush strokes as big as possible.
Also, I was not only applying lights and shadows but also different hues to have that flat boring surface already covered with some colour variation.

Tip: When you get into the details later the big chunks of colour will shine through and give a nice texture.

After painting some smaller details on the cutting board, I went over to the fish and applied the same workflow as for the board – filling in big areas of colour and then adding details.
At this time I got into my first problem: The fin was clipping weirdly into the body of the fish and it also looked very flat.

So for that reason, I went into Blender again, took the knife tool, cut more geometry into the fish body and moved the vertices slightly into the fin so both parts looked as if they belonged together.

In addition, I extruded the fin geometry so it wasn’t just a plane anymore and painted a shadow along the intersecting parts – and voila! I got a nice blending between body and fin.

Then I worked through the other parts as well. The herbs were just planes that didn’t have any colour information, so I picked a green colour and painted some random shapes that looked like parsley.
The idea was to roughly paint only a few planes to save time and get a quick feel for the overall picture.

After the first colours were applied I duplicated them around the fish.

But I wasn’t really happy with the shape of the herbs because they looked very meager and noisy, so I decided to redo them.
Looking closely at the concept I tried to copy the lush and voluminous foliage as closely as possible.

The second attempt worked out much better.

Then I continued painting further details, highlights and ambient occlusion beneath the fish.

A nice thing about 3DCoat is that all your layers can be edited in Photoshop and vice versa.

Tip: You simply go to Edit > Edit All Layers in Ext. Editor and it opens up in Photoshop.
You can add new layers or make any adjustments and if you hit the save button you will see all your changes in 3DCoat.

I did this for this project as well since the leaves didn’t match the colours in the concept and using Photoshop was the easiest and fastest way to fix that.

To make the fish really stand out, I added a gradient in Photoshop on top of the painted layer and played around with the layer settings.
This helped me to get the shiny parts even shinier and added some nice blue-ish tones into the skin to get some nice contrast between the fish and the orange wood or grilled surfaces.

At this point, I decided to post a work-in-progress shot into the Handpainter’s Guild on Discord and I received a lot of helpful feedback from various artists.
One critical thing that was mentioned was that the burnt parts of the lemons were way too dark and as you can see, it clearly distracts the viewer from the actual important element – the fish.

So to fix that issue I redid the lemons and toned down the values and the saturation as well.
Then I duplicated the lemons and foliage planes around the fish in Blender to fit the concept and added some glossy details to the foliage.

In the end, I went over everything and painted some more details like darker thin strokes and dots to give it more texture and polish.
A nice technique that I used quite often was the “bleeding” or “dithering” where one color dithers into the adjacent color through blobs and strokes.

It gave the fish skin a nice texture and was a perfect way to imitate its scales.

Rendering

For the rendering, I chose Sketchfab since I’m familiar with the tool and it’s free to use. So I basically uploaded my model and texture, picked a fitting background colour and played around with the available post-process settings.

Since it is hand-painted I didn’t have to worry about lighting, so I set the shading to shadeless and let the albedo texture do the heavy lifting.

Tip: At the end, I always like to add a subtle vignette to increase the focus on the model even more and that’s it.

After I took some render shots on Sketchfab I put them into Photoshop and created a fitting layout.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed the process of making this little prop and I’m really happy about the outcome and that I was able to finish it. Even if it was a simple and small-sized project, I have to admit that my hand-painting skills improved a lot compared to my older work.

It doesn’t always have to be a huge project which takes a lot of time and effort. Sometimes a small project is even more valuable since you get to finish the piece! – especially when you don’t have much time and tend to lose track too fast, like in my case.

In my opinion, it also enables you to try out a lot of different things in a shorter amount of time. In the end, it is better to have small pieces that you can fill your portfolio with than having nothing to show at all. So just do what you love and have fun no matter the project size.

Thank you so much to Games Artist for inviting me to write this article and a huge thanks to all my friends and awesome artists on Handpainter’s Guild for their lovely support and feedback!

If you have any questions or just want to connect you can find me on Artstation.

And if you’re interested in the texturing process here is the timelapse link as mentioned in the beginning.