I’ve noticed that my fish looks very different from the instructor’s, but I think that my topology is fairly clean. Not professional, but not brand-newbie. It looks like I’ve used fewer polygons and I’m not sure what negative effect(s) that might have down the road.
One thing I’m happy about is that I should be able to extrude the fins and tail without much trouble. It took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to do the loops there, even with watching the video.