Insect

Hi !

For this presentation, you won't discover a journey through all the work I've done in 3D, because there's a lot of stuff across multiple software packages since I started 3D.

So I'm going to concentrate on just one project, my latest, L'Insecte.

This project is the first work I've developed, which includes all aspects. And I'm going to show you not just an overview, as I would have done if I'd presented all my work, but all the details. The good but also the bad, because yes,  in every project there are problems, you just have to know how to solve them.

Enjoy !

For this insect project, I explored several avenues, in particular the different possibilities open to me.

I did my research on existing insects that I know, and others that I'm discovering for the first time, so I was able to create a series of invented insects. Some of them could fit into categories such as butterflies, beetles or grasshoppers.

The final design hesitated for a long time between two to go through the modelling. The first is a kind of grasshopper, but one that I saw as having an orange tinge, because it lives in an environment that isn't earth.The problem with the grasshopper, although its design is realistic, is possible on earth, was that I couldn't detach myself from the fact that it lived on another planet, and that its environment wouldn't be adapted quickly enough to earth.

And for the second, a sort of dragonfly. For this second choice, I still had to make some changes to the head. In fact, the head looked a bit like a dragon.

For its design, I found inspiration for the wings mainly from dragonflies, which I combined with shapes seen as butterflies.

The legs is a mix of ant and praying mantis.

The main part of the abdomen is similar to that of a firefly or a termite for its elongated shape, and to that of a white wasp for the plates that form the main shape. The abdomen is protected by a leaf similar to that of a stick insect or praying mantis, which ends in two parts similar to the lower part of certain butterflies.

The thorax is similar to that of a wasp, although the original aspiration was a bee, but its hairiness was unsuitable for long wings.

As for the head, we have that of a grasshopper combined with that of an ant with the antennae of a subspecies of beetle very widespread in tropical regions which has the particularity of having long antennae turned backwards. They have large eyes similar to those of flies.

The front legs are similar to those of praying mantises, while the other two pairs of legs are similar to those of grasshoppers.

Through my research, I ended up finding an insect that closely resembled it, called the chrisis ingnita.

For its environment, a dragonfly, the ideal place is a body of water large enough to accommodate dragonflies. So I decided on a combination of pond and waterhole.

Part of the pond would be shallow and rich in floral biodiversity. Rushes, reeds and water lilies would form part of the landscape.

Modeling

The start was a bit tricky, not technically but because I was going into too much detail too soon and too quickly. But once I'd started, there were no problems thereafter.

Shading

As far as the shape was concerned, I knew what I was going for, but the textures were a completely different matter. My initial ideas had largely evolved since the start, partly because the main insect element no longer had any hair, and partly because I still had in mind the insect I'd hesitated with, which was bright orange and unrealistic in terms of colour. So I started with the idea of the orange insect, which looks like a grasshopper, and merged it with the original colour, a dark green. After several tries I realised that the luminance wasn't high enough (--> dark). I then switched to a cousin of this grasshopper, which has lighter shades of green.

Repeated some parts several times, because of the map export problem.

Grooming

Once the initial groom on the thorax had been removed, it took away a lot of the preliminary worries. I kept a small one on the thorax but we went from the hairiness of a bee to that of a fly. A few implants were also done on the underside of the head and between the antennae.

I did the scalps directly without any major problems.

Rigging

I pushed it as far as I could to make it easier to animate.

Each blade of grass had its own rig to be able to swing, and the similarity of the controls made it possible to automate the swing.

For the insect, the most complicated part was repeating the rig for each leg because each leg has an ik-fk switch. I also automated the wing flapping and tail movement.

The main problem I had until the end of the project was that the texturing and the rig were done in parallel. And as I had quite a bit of hesitation about the texturing, it was done much more quickly. Which meant I forgot to skin the scapls which were created by grooming.

Animation

Thanks to the rig, everything was so simple to animate.

For the grass, all I had to do was find the right rhythm, the right angle and add some offset between the different tufts of grass.

The small problem I had for the insect, which isn't even a problem, was positioning the legs correctly on the stem.

I used a dragonfly landing on a blade of grass as an animation reference

Rendering

At this moment, I fixed the scaplt of the groom to the insect with Blendshapes before rendering.

Compo

A number of ideas came to mind at that point, including the fact that it was early morning in the mist. I found some references to mists, but they didn't sound very good, so I went back to a softer, more realistic version that matched the reference I'd found.

It's a project that has been particularly complex over time. Each time, you pick up little blunders from the previous stages, which you have to sort out in the subsequent stages. You only manage to sort out the problems one by one, and finally you have a project that's coming to an end, and you're satisfied with the result.