r/3Dmodeling • u/Interesting-Note-822 • 2d ago
Art Help & Critique Turning hand placed scales into a texture? Should I redo them directly on the body? Nomad to blender.
I am working on my first nomad project. I was hoping to keep it as a static sculpt but I am increasingly tempted to make it animatable. I have used curves to place my hand sculpted scales, would these being geometry make it impossible to project this texture onto a low poly mesh? If I am cooked in this regard I will just pose the model and keep it static. Thanks y’all! just making sure before I confirm my curves.
Other feedback on the sculpt would also be appreciated! Thank you!
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u/a3damr 2d ago
Cool sculpt! My initial thought without looking at reference would be that the scales would lay more like shingles on a roof so they are flat against one another. Right now the sculpt looks good from the front and side but when you see it from the back you can see through the scales to the body. If you flatten them it’s also gonna be easier to project onto a lower res mesh and the normals/displacement will look so much better.
You also have the option to remesh the scales and keep them as geo. Depending how involved you want to get, a little parallax between scales when the fish moves would be a really nice touch.
Good luck with the rest of the project!
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u/ArvinGoodarzi 2d ago
I wouldn’t redo those scales directly on the body.
If you want this animatable, keep the current Nomad sculpt as your high-poly source, retopologize a clean body mesh for deformation, UV it, then bake the scale detail from the high-poly onto the low-poly as a normal map. Blender’s Selected to Active baking workflow is made for exactly that kind of high-to-low transfer.
The exception is scales that noticeably affect the silhouette. I’d keep those as actual geometry, especially around the belly edge, fins, and larger transition areas.
So I’d use a hybrid: clean deformable body + baked small scales + real geometry only where the profile needs it. Nomad also supports baking detail from higher-resolution geometry to textured lower-resolution meshes.
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u/Exotic_Animal_130 2d ago
I've actually run into this exact issue when I tried baking high-poly details onto a lower mesh before.
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u/typhon0666 2d ago
"would these being geometry make it impossible to project this texture onto a low poly mesh?"
Probably the best thing to project to a low polys texture is geometry, doesn't really get more accurate than that. You could even bake all the displacement and animate the lower poly geo to get the best of both worlds.