[IDEA] Fish skin

Marian

Is there any way of making this on curved surfaces using a ruby script?

minguinhirigue

For this, you would have to see fredo6 and his script about drawing on curve. Since he did scripted a way to draw and extrude curved surface, he probably could help you with a way to copy multiple hexagons on a surface (quite hard on free surfaces ).

However, I think the best way to do it is probably to use kerkythea or a renderer soft with displacement mapping support... You will just have a bad time to align those textures of yours, but I thinks it's better than cracking your brain on ruby ?

Good luck

Marian

It's not only about making hexagons but maybe other shapes, which could be maybe used in conjunction with joint push pull, doing this type of effect would be very hard to make manually, and i'm not really a big fan of texturing and probably won't look the same.
This could be useful for making fencing or other things i can't think of through curved faces.

NewOne

better and easier way is to use a rendering engine which supports normal mapping or displacement maps.

the model will be smaller and easier to work with
there will be less polygons -more speed in rendering
is easier to map a texture than create so many shapes on a irregular surface
if you want the shapes to not be identical, but to have small differences (the scales on a fish are not identical one with other...let's say) -just take a photo of the wanted surface and edit it. And you can have it for later use.

...on the other hand, there is a script drop.rb made by TBD. It can be adapted to drop shapes on a surface and then to rotate those shapes according to surface's normal in the drop point. And you have a way to "seed" shapes on surface

..just some ideas, please don't judge me

Marian

I also thought about using drop.rb, that would be the closest to what i thought of.
And i just don't like comparing this with texturing methods, modelling is modelling and texturing and rendering is a different thing completely.

sepo

Yes it is better to displace it in rendering process. But if you wish to present it in SU than modelling becomes an option.
It would be very nice to have kind of populate script to work within given/chosen surface (including curved). One would be able to choose other surfaces/shapes to populate with. I supose one need to have some parameters; ie density (how much the shapes are allowed to overlap if any) and how do you treat intersection with given surface....Probably it would be useful to have "try again" if one is not happy with solution. It might be plugin already which can do this, or not.