Another self-imposed hobby project, Mermaid Princess Shirahoshi しらほし from One Piece.
Sometimes, the hardest part of the process is the “What should I make?” part. Doing fan-art gives me a somewhat concise goal to aim for, then it’s just having fun along the way.
Part of said ‘fun’ is coming up with solutions to these self-inflicted problems, eg the mermaid scales.
The problem statement is actually quite straightforward:
“Alternating rows of points evenly distributed over a surface”
Which resulted in this mess:
In short, the tail mesh is a tapered cylinder, all quads. However, the faces need to be square (or close enough). There might be a better way, but I just added edge loops and applied “Set Flow” - on repeat.
Then, the geo-nodes components:
- Instance on each vertex for odd rows (Mesh To Points > Vertices)
- Instance on face center for even rows (Mesh To Points > Faces)
- Get the face area as a size multiplier for each scale instance so that the ones near the tip are smaller
Texturing the scales was harder than I expected, long story short, I used the Sample Nearest Surface and Store Named Attribute “UVMap” to get the vertical stripes to align with the “skin” of the tail:
Anyways, shameless self-promotion links to my other works: