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Step 8: Edit fin images

Now if you use the "Draw Skin" function you'll see some strange looking fins. Each fin is drawn using a separate bitmap, and right now they have their original contents, which are really just placeholder images. You'll put photographic fins in next, but right now they'll look something like this:

The fins are numbered, and ordered from left to right based on the first base point pixel. In our example, we have 4. The top fin (dorsal) is fin 1. There are images named fin1.bmp up to fin10.bmp. We'll need to edit the first 4 to put rock bass fins into the images. Before you edit them they look like this:

Note that the left edge of the image is where the fin meets the body of the fish and the top edge is the leading edge, that is the edge with the base closest to the head of the fish. You can change the size of the fin bitmaps, but make sure both the width and height are multiples of 4 pixels.

To put real fins in the images, go back to the original photo, copy a fin, and paste it onto a fin bmp file. For areas where the fin isn't rectangular, you can use pure black, which will not be drawn when rendering the 3D model.

For our rock bass, we'll copy the dorsal fin into a separate image, make the background pure black, rotate to put the base on the left and the leading edge on top, and then use a clone tool to extend the fin to reach the left edge. We haven't completely removed the visible skin color from the fingers showing in the original photo, but it's much less obvious. We'll see how it looks in 3D. We can always come back and touch it up more if necessary.

The more rectangular you make your fin boundary in profile.bmp, the less distortion you'll see when your fins are modeled. Here's our dorsal fin after editing, and sizing to multiples of 4:

Since it's leading base point is the farthest forward of any fin (just barely) it goes in fin1.bmp. It will also make a good anal fin for the rock bass, and the anal fin starts 4 from the head, we'll save the same image as fin4.bmp too.

For the other two fins, which are both paired fins, we don't have a good view of them in our original photo. We could find such fins from another photo of a rock bass, or we can cheat a bit. We'll make those fins by copying part of the tail from our original photo, and edit a bit to round off the trailing edge:

Next - Step 9: View the complete fish in 3D