Description: To some this model is considered to be a “usual” transformation, but to me it is unusual. Everything living thing on this earth is conceived, born, lives, and dies in the same basic state. We don’t sprout new limbs at the age of 30, do we? The only thing that doesn’t follow this pattern is the butterfly. It begins its life and eats leaves and plants. Then, it wraps itself in a cocoon and goes through one of the most amazing and “unusual transformations” nature has ever seen. Not only does it grow wings, but it grows longer legs, and it’s entire body structure and shape changes. It is one of the most “unusual transformations” I have ever seen.
It’s a pure blender 2.44 render.
All models were created specifically for this project (even the background, which is not an image.) I used the defocus node for the faked depth of field (off subject, but the defocus node still needs work. That’s rendered with samples set at max (256) and it is still noisy). The tree branches are textured with a photo I took. I also converted it to grayscale which I used for the bump map. The butterfly wing was hand drawn by myself and UV mapped to the wing. Rendering time was over 3.5 hours, and I’ve been working on it all day, every day since friday.
The textures are very nice, however there are two bumps in the branch to the left that don’t really fit in with the dof.
Yeah, you can thank blenders defocus node for that. Since I didn’t do any PP on it (I wanted it to be in the “pure” category), I couldn’t correct that.
The wings emit too much light, and perhaps need some translucency. Conversely, your chrysalis is too transparent and needs to be a little greener.
The wings aren’t emitting any light and actually are slightly transparent. From what I’ve researched (google images, link the monarchs cocoon is transparent when they are hatching. Am I mistaken? I couldn’t get the bump map totally correct on the cocoon though. I agree though that it is a bit too… glossy (smooth)?
ok, first up, what parts of this are 3d&painted textures?
Well, everything you see in the render is entirely 3d. The butterfly’s wing design was done in photoshop and then UV mapped to the surface (which is a shaped plane, btw). The trees are cylinders which I shaped to look like trees and then bump mapped to get the fine detail.
I guess I don’t know exactly what you mean. Everything you see (the background, the trees, the butterfly, the cocoon) is all 3D meshes.
