Swordfish Texturing

Now my swordfish model is complete - i can start to apply a texture to my render.

I started off by 'Unwrapping' my model using the Unwrap modifier, however due to the shape of this particular animal the fins and tail made the unwrap result very difficult to work with. To work around this the fins and tail were removed and just the fish body was unwrapped. This allowed me to start texturing more easily by doing the fins seperately.



The next stage was to flatten the unwrapped image and save this as a file so the texture can be crafted using Photoshop:



I then imported the original swordfish image i have been working from to recreate the texture over the UVW wrapping mesh. To start, I selected the top half of the fish body and pasted on a new layer to the UVW mesh image, set the Opacity to 75% and began to shape the texture to cover the boundaries.