I think I have come close to finishing the details on the seahorse (yay! ) and now all I have left to do is the environment assets. I have already begun Uving Coral parts for texturing. Once I have finished UVing this little project, I plan on using exclusively Substance Painter 2 to generate my textures! I am really looking forward to getting to play with some textures and shaders! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VII

This "little" tutorial will go through the process of creating fins and fin shapes using curves and surfaces in Maya. I found this method to be the most "accurate"while building out the spiny shapes of fins in my current project, and thought I'd share my process. The tutorial below is broken down into three parts and will cover the basics of working with Curves in Maya. A. Building the Main Shape B. Creating the Spines C. Lofting Fin Shapes I will be diving into detail about certain tools in Maya. In this tutorial, I will go over using Live surfaces, converting edges to curves, lofting surfaces, converting nurbs to polygons, extrusions and moving constraints like snap to curve and snap to vertex. A. Building The Main Shape. Create a base curve . The base curve should match the center line of your mesh. This will define where the fin shape will start. If you have a mesh that is already topologized with a clean center line, extracting a curve f...

This week , I finished building out the fin shapes for the Seahorse, and I have begun blocking out "spines" along his jaw to give him more a a "rose with thorns" feel. I felt like the shape of the fins made him appear just a little too soft and figured he'd need a few defense mechanisms to ward off predators . While his fins are much larger than your average seahorse, the the general shape of his body and overall lack of a tail fin would still result in a pretty slow movement. I plan on adding spines along his snout and tail in my next update. I hope it will make him look just a tad bit more menacing! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VI