3D Fish Commercial Project: A Walkthrough: Part 1
Good Day, all.
I have been working on a project for a Marine Livestock online store. I will walk through it here as I work.
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I wanted the final result to be a sort of spoof of the Mac Ads [LINK] . So I sat down, and, very quickly, wrote a script. VERY quickly. I revised it very little before I set to work.
The concept was a couple of fish next to each other... one being beat-up looking, and the other looking good.
I skipped the storyboarding phase because, well, a couple of fish in a frame next to each other doesn't take a whole lot of visual planning. 
I didn't have to do to much modeling... I simply went to a very good free marine models website [LINK], chose the Yellow Tail Clownfish, and downloaded it.
I use LightWave 3D (much to the chagrin of Blender [LINK] fans) to both model and animate. Yes, Blender is good too... I recommend it to those who would like to learn 3D, but don't have money to spend. Be sure to get some good tutorials to get a good foundation [LINK] .
I pulled the fish into LightWave Modeler, and gave it a basic 3D skeleton and mouth morphs. Mouth morphs are basically the different mouth positions that a character would use as he speaks. I made M-P-B, A-I, E, F-V, L-D-N-Th, O, and OO. Just move your mouth to figure out what each of those look like. 
I also included a few for emotions and basic fin movement... since I didn't really want to use bones for the fins.
I then made a duplicate of this new model file, and a duplicate of the texture. The texture was then modified to look like a beaten, sick fish. This was saved, and put on my new model. I then cut tears on the fins to simulate fin tear.
I then had my two fish... one healthy, and one battered (no pun intended ) and was ready to set them up in Layout.
Part Two: Setting up in Layout coming soon!