Thuan Ha - FlatFab Project

FlatFab Model

Concept: Since I know I have to create organic shape, creating an animal would be ideal. After browsing through quite a few animal, I decided to settle with the shark, but not just any shark. To me, the hammerhead has always been a very unique animal because of the way its head is shaped. The wide head allow it to easily stand out from its counterpart especially from top view.

Technique: I started off by looking for a decent side view of the shark as a template for the overall silhouette. I loaded the image as an image template inside FlatFab so I can get the body shape correctly. 

After creating the main body shape, I proceed to create the tail shape separate from the body, because I want to avoid creating one big shape. Initially, the top fin was one piece, but later on I decide to have two pieces at an angle pointing toward each other in order to more accurately represent the fin shape. All the fin shape were created separately from the body in order to have a more interesting silhouette. 

Next up, the head shape was created with two separate pieces attached together since I cannot create one piece across, and the eye shape end up having to protrude further out from the head shape even though that is not accurate. To give the body more weight and depth, I took the base body shape and scale it down and put it at angle to kind of create the overall body shape of the shard. Finally, for the tail, instead of one piece, I created three pieces with a smaller in between pieces. Doing so, I can simulate movement in the model and make it feel less static.

Material: I created this model to look like those metal sheets model I have at home, so when rendering I turn on the metallic properties to give it a shinier look. I have a blueish gray color since I noticed the skin color is gray, but there are hints of blue in there possibly from light refraction in the water. I did use Blender to rendered this out with an ambient occlusion pass comp over the color. For the background it's a simple image of the ocean that happen to be the shark's habitat.