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.

Eagle Coming Together!

With the head completed, I could now focus on crafting a suitable body to attach this to as well as the eagle's legs.

I used a very basic side view of a bird to create the body using planes and adding a simple symmtery to get the completed 3d render. This was then attached to my eagle's head after adjusting the scale to best suit the head's dimensions.

The final part of this section was to create a pair of legs for my eagle. This again was created using a sideview scientific image of a chicken's leg and using planes to model it. I edited the claws slightly due to fact that an eagle's talons are much larger and more significant to an aerial Hunter.

Once this was completed, I imported the render as an object and simply scaled and attached the leg to the body. I had to mirror the leg using the symmetry modifier to create a right and left leg.

Swordfish cleanup

Looking at my original model, I found a number of inperfections in the vertices as well as the shape and angle of some sections. Because of this, I needed to completely Re-edit the model to reduce the number of vertices and cleanup some 'sloppy' edges which were incorrectly angled and contained some isolated vertices.



By doing this I have crafted a much 'cleaner' and maintainable model. i have also added some extra detail on the fins and nozzle.



One major problem i encountered while doing this re-editing came when I attempted to turbosmooth the model. Doing this created a huge gap through the middle of the swordfish. So in order to work around this I simply welded the suitable vertices together to close the gap. this took time but allowed me to keep a good end result.

I now need to add a few more details around the back of the head before creating and applying my texture to complete this model.

Eagle Head Complete

I have finally finished modelling the head piece for my eagle model. I was surprised by the amount of time this took to model as most of the work done here involved adjusting the model in numerous places to get the shape and angles correct.

Attaching the beak to the headpiece was fairly tricky as I needed to ensure that the mouth was visable from the front and the edges of the mouth wrapped around the front of the eagle's head. regardless of the time this took to render I am very pleased with the outcome!

Eagle Beak

here i have completed my beak for my eagle model. This took about 2 hours to craft the shape and beak sections (upper and lower etc) before applying a turbosmooth effect to finish.

TrapDoor Spider, updated 24/11/09

Here I have also begun to craft my spider. This model has quite a complex body shape and requires many close-up changes to be made to the legs.



Now the basic spider modelling has been finished I can start to shape the legs to give a standing effect.

Swordfish Development, updated 06/11/09

Here are some of the development stages for my Swordfish.. I found an extremely useful tutorial on 'how to model a dolphin' and simply used this for my own creation. the most challenging aspect of the model so far has been modelling the width and shape of the body, followed by the fin shapes.