I have this posted in the animation section as well, although I plan to take this much further than the fish there.
Is there any tricks for modelling the teeth? I would like to have 12-24 teeth which are complete with Gums and a tongue. I plan on animating him eventually.
No tips on big yet realistic style teeth?
Well, what I do when I want nice-looking (or ugly-looking, if you wish) teeth is to make one tooth-shaped object. I then duplicate it as many times as I need, while rotating and placing them on the jaw line as I need them. Then it’s just a case of resizing them for a slight difference between front and back teeth, and reshaping a few so that the eyes can pick out the fact that they’re not all the same. Maybe reshape a few to be slightly crooked. Or make them all razor sharp.
It’s a quick ‘n’ dirty method of doing it, but I find that it works for animations when things are constantly moving.
So how do you go about modeling the gums though? I think he needs gums too.
I don’t really make gums for my characters, as I usually go for a cartoony look.
I suppose what you could do is make a cube extruded many times across, so that there is one cube over every tooth, if you understand.
Then subdivide the gum. Grab the vertex that is over the middle of each tooth and move it up vertically away from the teeth. Smooth it and subsurf it and it kinda looks like a simple gum. Pull a few vertices around to make it look lumpy and play with the textures. After about 1 minute, I’ve come up with this.
Hope that helps. Other people may be able to make far more realistic looking gums though.
What do you think? I used sub d boxs linked for the gums, and positioned the vertices to reveal parts of the teeth.
That is brilliant. I love it. I love the way that he’s kinda smirking. And I have to say, that skin texture is amazing.
I can’t see too much of the gums though, but that’s not a bad thing. Keep up the good work.
note: feedback from a noob
The scales are beautiful. I really like how they reflect the light like that… Maybe it’s just me, but is the shape of the fish’s face a little odd? Did you model this with a hand drawn pic as a guide? I guess it’s supposed to look that way… kind of cartoony, heh. Man, the scales are excellent though. I need to learn how to do that. >.<
THe scales are just a procedural texture. A stucci map (vorroni f2-f1)
turblence 11.60, noise size 0.042 wall in, hard noise) i have double clicked in the map too settings:
hard and spec
single clicked -col and nor and its a difference blending with a slight ramp texture.
I would love to be able to export the procedural texture as an unrapped uv map. Anyway to do this? I could add lots of cool details than. And up the spec in certain areas. Also is there anyway to make the skin somewhat transclucent, like a sub scattering affect?
New update, having a ton of trouble getting the left iris (fish pov) eye to be the same shade as the other, they are both using the same gimp drawn iris texture. I want the left iris to be lighter. Perhaps its a lighting issue? I will keep tweaking the lighting and see what happens.
With tweaked lighting, and textures.
He looks great, but what is the blue squares on his theeths?
Hahahaha, now that’s one darn cool fish you got there!
Maybe move one or two theeths a bit around that it looks like he really needs the brackets.
By the way:
The different colored and sized eyes give him a cool crazy look.
heyu this looks alot like one of my characters wanan see?
That is a great fish! 
It is kind of cute, like a toy.
You need to get that guy’s Sewer Rendering, from the other thread, and put that sewer fish right in there.
He looks like my character? Do you have a link to the picture? I am not sure how your website works. The linking doesn’t seem to work there, to the gallery.
I may fix his teeth later on, but currently I want to finish adding his overall armature and weight painting him. Than I am going to see how hard it is to use RVKs. I want to get at least a blink out of him and and an O face. Not sure I want him in a sewer background, he is a river fish, I am working on a river environment in the animation section, I will have a blend file up soon.
Starting to rig him. here is a view of the rig. IF you want more pictures let me know and what angles. I am going to have to get rid of the procedural texture eventually and hand paint my own. I think it may be wise to not have any bumps around the jaw area, since that deforms a lot.
I am going to have to redo the tongue probably, make sure its attached somehow with parentint or null objects to the lower teeth and jaw.
Any suggestions for creating uv mapped scales? I am not sure how to mkae a decent Scale bump map. I want it to so it can render in Yavray, and procedural textures don’t seem to work as nicely as UV textures.
