The Butterfly - Part 1

Starting the butterfly was quite easy as I had a good idea of how I could go about making it and used my skills I learnt in tutorials. I remembered the leaf tutorial I did and thought of ways I could use the same techniques to make a butterfly in its habitat.

I started off by finding a good picture of some butterfly wings which I thought would make my butterfly look realistic and stand out from the background. I chose a blue butterfly and edited the wings in Adobe Photoshop to make one wing. I then created a black and white version of the one wing like I did in the leaf tutorial. These two pictures are shown below.
















I then created a plane in 3Ds Max and used the materials option to place the picture onto the place. I also went into the 'Maps' tab and put the black and white version as the 'opacity' option to make sure that only the butterfly wing could be seen on the plane and nothing else. I then also used the 'bump' option to make the butterfly wing more textured.














I also used the 'Symmetry' tool under the modifier menu which enabled me to make a mirror image of the one wing to make it a pair and look more like a butterfly. Without this option I would have had to create another wing and try to make it look exactly identical which would have been more difficult. In order to make the butterfly look more like a 3D I image had to use the 'edit poly' modifier so I could shape the wings to make them look more realistic. Because I used the symmetry modifier I only had to change the shape of one of the wings and the other wing formed to the same shape naturally.














Once I had both wings in the shape and size I wanted them to look, I then tried to create the body of the butterfly, which was quite difficult to do because they have a very particular body shape. I created a cylinder shape and reshaped it using the 'edit poly' modifier and also used the soft selection option to make sure the body curved subtly. I then used the material editor to make the body look more realistic and make it look like it belonged with the wings.














This is the rendered image of the butterfly that I created. I still have to add the antenna and make its habitat but i am quite happy with the way it looks so far.