This is the Blender Collaboration 2025, week 39 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.
This week’s subject is “Animal: Seahorse”.
“Animal: Seahorse” - A seahorse (also written sea-horse and sea horse) is any of 46 species of small marine bony fish in the genus Hippocampus. The genus name comes from the Ancient Greek hippókampos (ἱππόκαμπος), itself from híppos (ἵππος) meaning “horse” and kámpos (κάμπος) meaning “sea monster” or “sea animal”.
The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. At the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.
Thank you. I did not know the comic but it looks cool The inspiration in the back of my head was “Robot Shark” by Hajime Sorayama https://share.google/ojOcuXsF4QBhcdhbe
That image was included on several Pc Magazine cd-roms in the 90’s and as a teenager I made a print and hung it on my bedroom wall.
Aldo my wife told me that it reminded her of an episode of Santiago of the Seas where they used a seahorse submarine and our son loved to watch that show. So subconsciously I must have been influenced by that as well
@FedPete, congratulations on your seahorse submission. Creating the basic mesh was easy. But after adding the spines, I ran into some problems. My idea was to create a UV map with the “view” option. The side view of the mesh would then also be the UV layout. It works, but you’ll then have a stretch in the bitmap.
Wolfguardian - Great visual style. Could be a bit more mechanical (steampunk ?) style. Well done!
HoppyPirates - Well done turn table animation. It makes glass shine. Try to add a diffuse light point, for a softer light reflection (search web).
gallmerci - Cute seahorse, could be an animation character. The sunbeams are excellent!
Note: I don’t want to offend anyone. I try to write down positive ideas and visions in my simple use of the English language. I am also sometimes more inspired by a particular subject or solution. I’m also learning from you!
Well done @FedPete Lovely design and great use of lighting. I think you could have gone even one step further by adding a couple of very basic shapes in the far background to suggest even more depth.
I totally agree with your assessment that I could have pushed the steampunk / mechanical style even further, something to think about for next time
Yes, your right. I miss a bit of scale dimension and composition. Seahorses are small creatures. Adding a recognizable item would enhance that feeling. Lack of time … I have an old machine. And this underwater scene has a bit of fog so render times around 20min. My end goal was to make an animation. With waving fins. But it involved a lot of bones.
The same for the ‘Van life’ project. Also intended to animate, based on EEVEE.
My learning from this project:
Take care of your assets (make them re-usable)
Make the complete mesh and then UV-map ( I did an in between UV-wrap, which worked well. But than added more mesh (spines), which weren’t connected to the Uv-map - a restart - lost time and work ).
Need to start rethink upfront about the end composition. All I was doing on focusing on creating a good Seahorse asset. Which isn’t finished now, so a bad asset for later use.
so I took the prompt as inspiration.
The inspiration in the back of my head was “Robot Shark” by Hajime Sorayama 
Lovely design and great use of lighting. I think you could have gone even one step further by adding a couple of very basic shapes in the far background to suggest even more depth.