So I've been working on this model since Friday. It's a low-poly Monarch butterfly, prepared for render with Eevee or Cycles render engines in Blender 2.83. It's intended for animation, with a fully customized rig, including custom bone controls for the wings, and IK controls for the antenna and legs. The head and abdomen are also fully articulated with bones. Uv Unwrapped and textured with PBR texture maps. Overall polygon count is just over 1800.

The wings are just alpha-clipped planes, but I've created a SSS mask map to control the SSS, which helps give the orange areas interact with light better.

I created this model for an animation I'm producing, but once I've completed that, I think I'll probably release this model as a free .blend file if anyone is interested. I'll put it up on my usual social media outlets, but I might also post it to Blend Swap. I've never posted anything there before.

That's looking fantastic Lux. I'd love the free .blend file, but I don't do social networking other than my 3D forums. I've never been one for Facebook, Twitter and the like. ~shrugs~

@Miss B That's ok. If I do give it away free, I'll definitely post it here in the freebies as well.

Here's a closeup screencap of the rig. This is only my second try at creating a rig for a character in Blender, but I'm impressed at the rigging capability that Blender offers. It's very easy to set up a custom rig once you know the basics, and IK solving is very simple as well. The large circle at the bottom is the overall control to move the entire model, the up and down arrow shape controls both wings at the same time, and the four blue bones outside the wings control the wings independently if necessary. There's also IK controls on each of the legs and the antenna to pose or animate those parts individually.

I guess I'll put the rig to the test in this animation project and if there's anything else I can think to add to make it easier to control I'll do it before releasing the .blend.

Nice work on it, looks real good.

Pre animation clips available ?

That reallu looks amazing and at only 1848 polygons just Wow really great work LuxXeon

@Lobo3433 Thank you so much my friend! I really appreciate it.

@CHK2033 Thank you. Yes, let me see if I can get a few pre-rendered animations of the object in dev mode shortly. I'll make a screencap video of the rig/model in action.

LuxXeon posted at 11:29PM Sun, 06 September 2020 - #4398810

@Miss B That's ok. If I do give it away free, I'll definitely post it here in the freebies as well.

Thanks.

Here's a video showing how the rig is working so far. Seems as though all the IK controls, skinning, and custom constraints are working. I can't think of anything else I'll need to do, but I may need to tweak some of the envelopes here and there. I'll see how it holds up in the real animation.

Looks pretty much done to me, Only thing I guess you could do would be those tiny hair's they have on the thorax and ab which I guess you would only really see on close up's anyway so isn't a "must have feature" and that weird tongue they have which again depending on the video you may not need that either. this is very nice and inspiring.

Thank you

CHK2033 posted at 12:20PM Mon, 07 September 2020 - #4398850

Looks pretty much done to me, Only thing I guess you could do would be those tiny hair's they have on the thorax and ab which I guess you would only really see on close up's anyway so isn't a "must have feature" and that weird tongue they have which again depending on the video you may not need that either. this is very nice and inspiring.

Thank you

Than you! You know, I almost forgot about that tongue piece. I was thinking I could include that as an optional piece. Maybe just use shape keys to animate it in and out and curling rather than rigging that. This way you can hide it if you don't want to use it? Otherwise, I could just copy the IK controllers for the antenna to the tongue if I wanted more control, but I really don't think I'm gonna need that. The animation I plan to use will be a close up shot, so maybe I'll have to include that.

On another note, since the model is low poly to start with I opted to just paint the hair into the PBR texture map. If I zoom in really really close, you can see there's a hair-like texture. However, I think it's still possible to use hair particles on the object if we need more extreme realism. They should be able to "stick" to the rigged mesh. So I've left that as an optional thing as well. Good ideas though!

Most of the lowpoly butterflies I've seen for Blender are ultra-low poly, intended for distant shots or as instances in particle systems. So I went with something here that could be used in real-time Eevee renders, but also will work for Cycles and photorealistic work if you needed it.

I'll definitely post the final rendered animation here when it's finished. The butterfly is the last thing we needed.

Hi everyone. So our animation is almost completed. We're rendering out the frames now. I thought I'd post a few still frames from the animation which shows the butterfly. I will post the full animation in its entirety when it's finished.

A couple of things to keep in mind: This animation is very large. I've compressed the images and resized them down to 1080p, but the original frames were rendered with Eevee render engine at 2k size, 60FPS. There is obvious motion blur and DOF in the animation, so of course the still frames will have that in them as well. Anyway, here's a couple of shots using this model. Pay no mind to the strange object. It's an "alien" plant that the butterfly is landing on. It will make more sense in the entirety of the animated scene.

Outstanding, cant wait to see it all in motion :)

CHK2033 posted at 3:17PM Thu, 10 September 2020 - #4399128

Outstanding, cant wait to see it all in motion :)

Thank you! One thing that was very important to us was getting a translucent effect on the wings, so when light hits them from above, it brightens only the orange areas from beneath. I decided to control that effect with a SSS mask, but in the stills I posted above from our first render of the scene, the effect didn't come out correctly. Luckily, there were only about 1000 frames where this would be seen by the camera, so I fixed the maps and got the SSS and transmission working correctly in the material, then we went and rendered out those 1000 frames again today. Here's a preview of how that looks now in the same scene...

At first, I didn't think it would even be noticeable with all the movement going on in the shot, but it was. Thankfully, we decided to use Eevee for this animation instead of Cycles, because at 2k resolution and 60fps, even a 10-second clip is about 600 frames of footage. Each frame in Eevee, with all the bells and whistles cranked up to the highest settings, we were able to achieve just 13 seconds per frame of render time. The same scene, tested on Cycles with an RTX 1070 GPU and Intel OpenDenoiser, was taking about 28 seconds per frame. So that's a big difference. Of course, the Cycles quality was slightly better, especially where shadows were concerned, but to be honest the difference wasn't nearly enough to justify the longer render times. Even with Denoiser, we still needed to use a minimum of 128 samples in Cycles to get a clean result without flickering. So Eevee was just a much better option here.

That's good to know, I need to animate a few things I've been sitting on way to long in Blender as well for a Demo reel since Eevee made that a lot more easier to get done

CHK2033 posted at 1:52PM Sun, 13 September 2020 - #4399357

That's good to know, I need to animate a few things I've been sitting on way to long in Blender as well for a Demo reel since Eevee made that a lot more easier to get done

Eevee is absolutely fantastic in most cases for animation, especially now that there is object motion blur in the newest release. However, there are some problems with 2.9 that prevented me from using it for all the shots in this animation. I really wanted to use it for the butterfly shots here because the object motion blur would be perfect for this type of thing and it helps give the motion a really organic feel, even at 2k resolutions. The problem was, we couldn't get more than 300 frames at a time to render in 2.9 without a software crash. The same scene in 2.83.4 rendered just fine without any issues, but of course, then again we didn't have any object motion blur in Eevee with those frames. So we struggled to get this to work in 2.9 and opted to render just 300 frames at a time, suffering through crash after crash, until we had all the shots we needed with the object motion blur in Eevee. Then the rest of the scenes were done in Blender 2.83.4. Thankfully, Blender is one software that allows for this type of scene file-swapping between versions, within reason, without any real problems or differences in the rendered frames. So our motion-blurred butterfly shots were done in 2.9, and all the rest of the shots were done in 2.83.4.

I'm going to post an animated preview shot of the butterfly later tonight. It's not the finished product yet and is only one of several shots with the butterfly but hopefully, you'll get to see what I mean. BTW, there's a lot of settings that need to be adjusted in Eevee to get it looking as close to Cycles as possible. Some of them are obscure, depending on the types of materials you're using in the scene. Let me know if you need any tips with that when you're doing your animations.

Here are a couple of shots of the butterfly in the animation. This isn't complete, and there's some tweaking that needs to be done now that we've put all the clips together. Lots of re-rendering will be necessary because now that the final shots are together in sequence, we've noticed some small problems with the keyframes. I've resized the footage from 2k to 1080p just to show here. These are only parts of the overall animation.

Looking great Lux!

Miss B posted at 2:39PM Mon, 14 September 2020 - #4399474

Looking great Lux!

Thank you, Miss B! As I mentioned, the butterfly is just a small part of a much larger animation but it's a very important part of the scene. So once we rendered out all the shots and edited them together, we noticed a few things "wrong" with it, so we tweaked the animation and re-rendered the frames again. I'll post a new version once that's all edited. The full animation is going to take a few days to put together in editing, but I can post the revised butterfly clips later to this thread. I appreciate the support. I'll definitely release this model and rig for free once the final cut of the animation is finished and pubicized.

I look forward to seeing the edited version when you have it ready.

It did come out very nice , next is Miss B's animation on the destruction of the coliseum.. Go Miss B! ?

CHK2033 posted at 12:39AM Sat, 19 September 2020 - #4399809

It did come out very nice , next is Miss B's animation on the destruction of the coliseum.. Go Miss B! ?

My what??? I don't do animations, so I'm not sure why you would think I was going to do one of the destruction of the coliseum. I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, but these old eyes aren't seeing it. ~rolf~

Not even just a turn table when it's done? I'm just messing with you, but a turn table with eevee when it's complete would be rather cool looking.

Hmmm, a turn table might be cool, but I'm not sure how I'd get the grooves done on the record(s) I'd play on it, so I think I'll have to wait on that.

Miss B posted at 5:52PM Sat, 19 September 2020 - #4399899

Hmmm, a turn table might be cool, but I'm not sure how I'd get the grooves done on the record(s) I'd play on it, so I think I'll have to wait on that. :wink

?

CHK2033 posted at 8:29PM Sun, 20 September 2020 - #4399895

Not even just a turn table when it's done? I'm just messing with you, but a turn table with eevee when it's complete would be rather cool looking.

Are Boni and Miss B the same person? I thought you were talking about Boni's amphitheatre model from the other thread. I was so confused for a minute. haha ;)

One of the animation is a coliseum I'm redoing from the very old columns destruction in my gallery, just being lazy and trying to get Miss B to do it for me. :)

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/sim-test/2917615/

Hmm! next time I'll come with chocolate first :)

CHK2033 posted at 11:15PM Sun, 20 September 2020 - #4399973

One of the animation is a coliseum I'm redoing from the very old columns destruction in my gallery, just being lazy and trying to get Miss B to do it for me. :)

Hmm! next time I'll come with chocolate first :)

Ahhh, now you're learning.

CHK2033 posted at 11:41PM Sun, 20 September 2020 - #4399973

One of the animation is a coliseum I'm redoing from the very old columns destruction in my gallery, just being lazy and trying to get Miss B to do it for me. :)

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/sim-test/2917615/

Hmm! next time I'll come with chocolate first :)

That's looking good. What are you using to render with in Maya?

LuxXeon posted at 11:57PM Sun, 20 September 2020 - #4399990

CHK2033 posted at 11:41PM Sun, 20 September 2020 - #4399973

One of the animation is a coliseum I'm redoing from the very old columns destruction in my gallery, just being lazy and trying to get Miss B to do it for me. :)

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/sim-test/2917615/

Hmm! next time I'll come with chocolate first :)

That's looking good. What are you using to render with in Maya? .......................................

Now Arnold or Renderman But for that old thing.. 10 years back I think it was just MentalRay or something simple like playblast don't really remember) I know it wasn't maxwell cause... I'd still be waiting for it to finish.. lol, no setup since its was just a test for the laptop, thanks

@CHK2033 I used to be a 3dsmax user until the last year or two when I switched to Blender. I worked with 3dsmax since 2004 in a studio environment but had been playing around with it since 1998 (maybe even earlier). I think the first version I ran with the trial was 3ds Max r3. Anyway, a lot of the most popular raytracing/pathtracing engines we have today started as a plugin for 3dsmax. Maxwell and Vray come to mind first, but there were others like Brazil (which is now only available for Rhino I believe). Brazil was extremely popular for Max when I got my first freelance VFX job back in 2005, and a lot of studios were using it then. Vray was just starting to make waves. Mental Ray was only available in Softimage XSI back then, Arnold wasn't yet invented that I'm aware of, and Renderman was only used by the most elite studios that could afford a TD in the rendering/shading pipeline. Man how things have changed. Just 15 years ago, no one was using path tracing or even basic raytracing in production. Everything was either baked like they are now in video games, or we used scanline rendering with fake reflections and shadow maps only. GPU rendering changed that forever. Now everything is path traced, and baking has become so advanced that it's almost indistinguishable from how path traced stuff looked just 10 years ago.

Oh yeah I remember Brazil, XSI I actually used a lot and still have my last version 7 and the game edition Mod Tool somewhere, I was one of those griping and complaining when AD purchased them only to gut it out as we all knew would happen, Max I never really for some reason got into I used it a lot but nothing organic, C4D I played with in Germany back in the early 90's @ this studio, I liked it kinda, actually in the end back then I picked Maya because I was working in the game Unreal and they had a plugin in Maya direct to the content file type for the game, today as you say, things are so different , Once I posted something I was creating (Zombie looking creature ) on SimplyMaya. and the first thing comment was, nice Zbrush sculpt..? I'm thinking people forgot what SubD modeling is ...smh., not really complaining as the only thing that matters to me are the end results of whatever it is, and plus if I can sculpt out a base in a hour or so as opposed to a day or so then Hey..I'm all in. But yes I have to agree 100% the people getting into this today have it so easy compared to back in the days, like back in the days especially current Blender users. They just don't know how good they have it today. I used blender back when the UI was ..lets say not the best, that top down default stat up UI look smh..still very usable but...smh..now today Id use it over anything outside of Zbrush (there getting there but Zbrush is like the standard now in sculpting)

Any hoot didn't want to take away from Vid wasn't my intentions so, lets change the subject to:

When is the ButterFly's revenge the sequel come out ?

@CHK2033, oh I don't mind talking CG in this thread. I agree with you about Zbrush. I also use Zbrush. It seems to be the one software package that is in almost every professional studio pipeline these days, regardless of which primary package that studio is using. I've even found Zbrush in some archviz studio pipelines! Blender has invested a lot in its sculpting module, which is certainly much better than it was even a year ago, but Zbrush is still many degrees more advanced for high-frequency realistic sculpting. I still have yet to work with any sculpting package that can handle the tens of millions of polygons that Zbrush can deal with, effortlessly. I'll use Blender's sculpting tools for some quick blend shapes or corrective blend keys for armature animations because it's just so convenient to not have to round-trip the model into another package, but when it comes to high-frequency details or sculpting for displacement or normal map baking, Zbrush is still the best. Especially for baking purposes, it really can't be matched.