What does one do in the heat of the Summer and during a "post drought" on RWFF Forum in August? For me at least, it is a great time to learn something new and to sharpen up the skills in using the various graphics software tools available. Here is a great and FREE image editing software for you, the outing builders and fish makers. It is called "Photoscape" and it is a great piece of software and the price is right...free! This software has many of the features that other paid softwares have. You will have a lot of fun playing around with this one!
You can download the software via this link:
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/download.php
Here is a "Mystery Fish" for you. Do you know what it is and where it lives? Please post your guesses and answers on this Forum.
The above pictures looked pretty nice but it is actually the third version that I have built during the last two days. For those interested in fish building there is a great read me by Paul, and an excellent step-by step set of instruction by Richard in the Club House. I thought about building a video tutorial but the video will be too long to post on YouTube. So briefly this is what I started out with and what I ended up with.
First you need to find a good profile picture of the fish that you want to build. I started out with this one:
It is pretty nice picture but there are some problems with the lighting as you will see later. After going through the process building and animating the fish using the RWFF fish building tool. I ended up with the GIF and the pictures below. The pictures looked pretty decent but I was not happy with the rotation of the fish in the GIF file. You notice that there are some severe dark spots on the fish's head? This will show up in the outing when it jumps out of the water and during the landing. The darkened spots didn't look good and we can't have that, right? There is no way to correct this within the fishing building tool and I had to go back and work with the "profile" picture that I started out with.
Notice the darken area on the head, it doesn't look too good!
When you compared the above and below GIF pictures you will see what I mean. In the old days before the jumping fish series it really didn't matter what the fish looked like as long as they are of the approximate shape and color as the RWFF fisherman will seldom see their catches until the fish are near their feet and the caught pictures came up. Now that you are able to see the fish more clearly when it jumps there is a need to make the fish to look as good and as realistic as possible. Yes, it is a lot more work but I think the results are well worth it.
I had a lot of fun building and improving on the appearance of this fish during the last couple of days. Hopefully this fish will soon appear in a theater near you. "Sure is pretty", as they would say out in the West!
Regards,
Stanley
