I have now finished the rig for my shark. I had some difficulty with the constraints working with the joints but finally got the issue solved. I made joints from the mid section of the shark down to the end of the tail. I got some advice from Alec who said about making the joints across the full body of the shark and the fins of the shark. I had to toggle around with the smooth skin weights to make sure that the movement of the tail doesn’t deform the shark’s body or fins. I have now completed the rigging for the body, and the constraints work perfectly now.
After this I exported the low poly mesh to substance painter in preparation for adding the textures. I explored some of the materials to see what came closest to the look of shark skin. Leather didn’t really work, even when the scale was adjusted but I though that the human belly skin material surprisingly looked pretty good for the shark skin. Once I changed the colour I thought it looked quite realistic and similar to real shark skin, from what I seen in images. I added a cobalt material to the eyes to give them the shiny appearance, I used a black fill on the eyes. I used the paint tool to paint the sharks underbelly a bright white, resembling the look of a Great White Shark.
