So the original concept of the Techno Frog was very much about fishing a frog and it's not like any other frog lure you've seen before. Everybody's used to throwing the top water frog, it's a classic and it's been done for a long time, but frogs don't only live on top of the water. Did you know that bullfrogs are one of the biggest predators of bass eggs? When they're on the spawn, they're not doing that for the top of the water, they're getting down in there and eating it up!
So we wanted to design a lure that specifically targeted that instinct in a bass to really whack the crap out of a frog that's down in the water, swimming around and we have done it. This is the Techno Frog.
The Techno Frog and Ways to Fish
So this lure smacks the crap out of bass, they have an instinctual reaction to it as it flutters by. You can fish it on a Ned head, if you have a hard bottom you can twitch it along on the bottom. My favorite way to fish it is with an owner twist lock hook with a 1/16th ounce weight on it. It hooks perfectly in the back and it's completely weedless, you can throw that thing up in the lily pads all day long and they absolutely inhale it, especially when you drag it across the top of that lily pad.
The Rigging Nose of the Techno Frog
One thing you'll notice on the Techno Frog is there's this little piece of plastic sticking out of its nose and that was a key part of our design which makes it like no other lure that I'm aware of. You'll see a lot of frogs, or even fish, imitations that are just the shape of the fish and ricking those can be very difficult and tricky. You have to get some special hook and parts that you can only be made in places like Taiwan and blah blah blah. So we said, you know what, we don't want fish like that. We want to have a variety of ways to rig this, but still get that very lifelike shape and appearance of a frog and that's why we came up with our ringing nose. You can throw a net head on it which comes out perfectly in the top of the frog's head, you can use an owner twist lock hook which comes out super weedless because that hook comes right up the back of the head, there's a million ways to rig it and hope you find one that works for you.
Keeps the Bass Guessing
If you've ever fished a lake where everybody gets on some kind of bite, whether it's a topwater frog or a Senko or whatever, you'll notice that it's hot for awhile and then it tapers off because the fish get used to it. I can tell you the fish in your lake have never seen a lure like this one so I hope you'll check out the Techno Frog.
Promo Code
The website is wmbayou.com which is linked HERE and use the code technofrog15 to get 15% off your first order. You guys are going to smash the crap out of the fish!
What’s up everybody! Today we are going to try and produce some organic looking scales using a combination of Fusion 360 and Blender. Let’s go!
I’ve been on a quest to produce natural looking scales for my molds for quite some time now and it’s led me all over the place. I want to give you a quick update in the hopes that someone smarter than me will be able to take this process and refine it a bit better while I sit around and struggle with blender. But first let me overview the process I’m at right now and show you the results I’m getting.
So you produce the mold in Fusion 360 and then what you want to do is export each half of the mold as an OBJ file and high refinement. This is key as I’ve found, you don’t want anything less than high when you’re going back and forth because the blender is high. Once you have your OBJ file exported, you need to open up Blender. Now, I don’t know Blender much at all, I am like a bind squire looking for a nut in there, it’s crazy how complicated this software is. I wanted to share this with you because if you know Blender better than I do, you’ll be able to get far better results.
Here’s the basic idea, you load your OBJ into Blender then you go into sculpt mode and the first thing you want to do is remesh. You’ll see you mold looking like of like garbage right now so if you just click over in the little tool icon, go down to remesh and just click remesh it’ll look like nothing is happening for awhile and then all of a sudden your mold will look normal again. That is key because I was trying to do it before figuring out remesh and it just looked really bad and was not useful at all.
The next thing you want to do is use a texture, specifically a scale texture. Textures, in this case, are black and white images so you can just go into Google and search for scale texture, scale displacement, scale height map, etc. and find black and white scale patters. That’s what I’m using in this demonstration and I’ve linked it here. I’m using this one because it is a little more organic, not just rows and rows of the same scales because I think it’s the most like a normal fish since they don’t have perfect scales most of the time. Once you have your image, go to the texture button which is the little checkerboard over on the right-hand side. Click new, open and then find your image and you’re good. Again, I can’t give you a complete tutorial on using textures in Blender, there’s several videos out there and I have a playlist linked to them here. These are the videos I’ve found to be helpful in this process so you can watch the same ones I did or you can look up your own Blender texture tutorial videos. Just be careful when you’re looking for videos, Blender is rapidly under development, the current version is 2.9 and they’re about to come out with 3.0 so if see any Blender tutorials just make sure it’s the latest version. All the version are pretty similar, but if you go older than 2.8 it gets different and very confusing.
So now you have your texture in here and you need to do something with it. So if you go back and clock on these little tool icons here you see you can go down to texture and you’ll want to choose stencil. Now when you choose stencil, if you take your mouse and go back into the main viewport, you’ll see your stencil appear over here on the bottom left corner. If you hold the right mouse button and clock and hold the right mouse button you can drag the stencil over and put it over the area you want to be in. If you need to rotate it as we do here, I hold down the control key, right click and then move the mouse around. You can rotate it into the position you want it, you can scale it up or down if you hold down the shift key and right click the mouse. Once you have your stencil in the place you want it to be, select the draw brush and what you want to do now is change the strength of the brush which you can do if you click in the upper left at the very top. There you’ll see this strength icon and just click on that to change it. I like to use a .2 and this allows for you to kind of roll your brush over the texture. How much it’s going to imprint this texture into the model is higher than this number, the higher the number the steeper the gradient and the more strength it has. Obviously, you don’t want to deform your mold greatly with your scales, you want a nice light touch for the most part. I like to start at .2 and as I brush it over more it’ll get higher and higher which is the tricky and artistic part of this process. Once you click .2 you can change your brush diameter in the same place, by strength. You can just click on it and type in a number but I also found you can click the F key and then move your scroll wheel up and down to change the size as well, then click the left mouse button to set it. I found that to be helpful but again, there are several tutorials over Blender.
Now you’re ready to start putting your pattern into place. You just click the left mouse button and drag and paint over the area that you want to have your scale pattern with. Again, this is the part that gets tricky as you want to keep it away from the plat parts of your mold if you can and obviously jeep it away from any other parts of the mold that you don’t want scales on. I believe if you want to make this process easier, you would use masking which I haven’t gotten into yet but I’m sure you can find some masking Blender tutorials that would be useful for this. Masking is basically just covering up an area of your model to where it doesn’t get the stencil when you put your mouse over it. Again, it would be super useful and I’m sure you can find a tutorial on it. Once you’re satisfied with your scale result, the last thing you want to do is you wanted to remesh again. Now I’m not 100% sure this is required but I didn’t remesh once and I got a model back out without my scales so I think it’s very important to do. You’ll click on the little toolbox up here, go down to remesh and just click remesh. You don’t have to change any of the settings.
Once that is done, you’re ready to export it. You’ll just click on the file, export STL, save it to where you normally save it and then you’re good to go. Now you want to obviously do this with the other side of the mold as well so you just have to repeat the process. You can actually bring them both in at the same time if you want to and just hit the little eyeball here to turn one off and on. Doing this is how you get some better symmetry, but it’s up to you. Personally, I like that one side has a different pattern than the other but that’s just me. I like what I have so now all I have to do is print. To do that, all you have to do is load it into whatever slicer you want, in my case I’m using CHITUBOX and load it in and you can see the pretty scale patter is in the model so it’ll come out in the print which is exactly what you want. Hit print and look at the results, they’re pretty killer.
I hope you found that useful, guys! Again, I’ve linked all of the tutorials I’ve watched on Blender and if you want to see how I make the initial molds in Fusion 360 I have a full playlist here.
Here we are at a secret fishing spot of mine. I already see fish in here which is a good sign. Hopefully, the rain is done since it was supposed to be done by now. I love this fishing spot right after the rain, it seems to be when the most fish are in here. The fish seem to lose interest after about three or four hours so I’m going to shut up and start fishing because I saw a really big carp that I want to catch.
For bait today I’m using my homemade gulp-like bait. This bait is a gelatin, Agar-Agar, almond extract and some panko. Hopefully it works, it’s supposed to mimic break but stay on the hook longer. I just slap a couple of those baits on my steelhead rod on my Shimano Stradic 1000 and I’m ready to go. My Shimano Stradic 1000 could get me in trouble today because if I hook a carp and he goes into the current I’m going to have a hard time getting him out.
I try to stand far back from the edge and just keep a lower profile so I don’t spook the fish too much. The bait still looks good, it’s getting a little mushy but that’s exactly what we want to happen. What you really want is your bait as close to the current as you can possibly get. It tries to get pushed in a little but I find that the fish kind of hang out in the big current and pop their heads in right on that edge.
I got him! Fish is on. It’s not the carp I wanted, it looks like a catfish, just a little channel cat doing his little death roll. I’m trying to find a spot to land him since these wet spots here will be like ice. He’s actually a really good size. Once I look at him, I’ll let him go.
I think what we’re going to try to do is go a little bit further down the bayou. We’re really close to this levee right there and if I let my line drift out a little bit further, close to the corner I may have a better shot at getting a bigger fish. I’m going to let my line bounce in there. I don’t think I’ve ever actually caught a fish putting my line out in the current but I know that’s where they like to hang out. I like to let it swing in there and kind of settle wherever it wants to settle.
There we go, got him! That took me by surprise, I think that it’s going to be a grass carp. I’m trying to keep him out of that current. It is a grass carp, I finally caught him. I can’t, for the life of me, see my line but he’s right there. I finally got him moving in the right direction but the problem is getting close enough to land him here which is going to be difficult. But luckily, I finally got him.
Super cool fish there, very nice. We’ll stick him back in the net so he’ll get a relatively safe transport back to the water. That bait obviously works, it was a super cool fish to catch. If you want to see how I made the bait, click here. If you’re interested in bayou fishing videos, click here.
