bob...there's something fishy going on!

With this issue, I'm starting a 3 part tutorial explaining how to make a school of swimming fish in Softimage. Naturally, the first step in this process is to actually model the fish. We'll be making a NURBS fish by skinning several curves over a rotoscoped profile. This technique is very common and is great for making models with a complex profile but a simple basic shape.

First, you'll need a profile of the fish you want to model. You can draw one and scan it in or just "borrow" a picture from the Internet. Here is the profile I used. It's a Florida Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides floridanus) also known as the Black Bass.

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Save your profile as a .pic file in the pictures directory of your fish database. Then in Softimage, you can select "Rotoscope (wire)" in the Right window.

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Select your fish profile pic and click OK. Now you have your fish's handsome mug proudly displayed within Softimage.

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The next step is to create a NURBS circle and scale it so that is matches the cross-section of your basic fish. Get a primitive 12 step cubic NURBS circle and scale to about .5 or .4 in X. Use your eye to judge. Now you can freeze the scaling on that circle and got to the Rotoscope view. Move and scale the first circle so that it lines up with the middle of the rotoscoped fish image.

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Now duplicate that circle several times and move and scale the profiles several times until you have 10 or 15 evenly spaced ribs covering the body portion of the fish (don't do the head area, that'll be a separate piece). You'll want to curve the ribs up near the head so that the skin follows the curve of the gills area. Here is what my ribs look like.

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Skin those ribs together by selecting Model>Surface>Skin. Choose the NURBS option so that you get a NURBS surface. Close the ends of your fish body by choosing Model>Info>Selection and checking the capping options for bottom and top. Now you'll have something like this.

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Do the same thing for the head piece. Make several cross-sections that describe the profile of the fish's head. Also, when you are doing the gill area, be sure to include 1 or 2 interior profiles so that the gill area of the head is concave.

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Skin the head like you did before, but don't bother to cap the ends. The mouth can be open and the inside of the head won't be visible. You may need to pull a few points near the corners mouth to get a good look. When you are finished, you should have something like this.

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Now that you have the basic body of the fish, all you really need to do is to add fins. You can make NURBS spikes for the fin's spines with a NURBS sphere. Get a primitive cubic NURBS sphere and use the Model>Draw>Cut command to cut it in half at the 3.00 mark in V. This operation will leave the original sphere plus a top and a bottom half. Delete the original and the top so that you are just left with the bottom part. Scale the hemisphere to 0 in Y so that it becomes a flat NURBS pancake.

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Tag the inner 3 rows of points on the pancake and (in tag mode) translate them up in Y. Then untag the outer-most of the 3 rows you tagged and continue until you have a lovely NURBS spike like this.

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Go to the Rotoscope view and scale, translate and copy the spikes so that they are installed all along the fish's fin areas. Soon you'll have this.

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Now all you need to do is to trace the outlines of the fins and extrude them (NURBS please). Rotate and translate the pectoral (shoulder) and the Pelvic (hip) fins so that they stick out on the right side of the fish in a natural way. Model>Effect>Symmetry will place a mirrored duplicate on the other side of the fish. Parent the fish all together, add some NURBS sphere eyes, and you are the proud owner of a beautiful fish model!

Advanced stuff: To really make the model shine, you'll need to pull some points near the tail so that in pinches in laterally in that area. Also you can extract the curves at the edge of the mouth and do a curve-node deformation on a primitive cylinder to get some fish-lips.

Next time well texture this scale-encrusted leviathan.


Peter Arisman is a digital artist working and living in Seattle. He can be contacted at reepete@geocities.com and has a web site at www.3dartists.com.

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