Weekend Contest Winner: Butterfly
The BlenderNation weekend contest is growing in popularity! This weekend’s edition, themed ‘Colorful Nature‘, had no less than 17 entries! And it was a very close call indeed – 4 images were almost tied for the lead, but in the end Aron van Leeuwen’s butterfly collected the most votes.
Congratulations Aron! You can pick the topic for next weekend’s contest. Please don’t the topic here, but contact me at bart @ this website. Have fun selecting one :)
Awesome! Congratulations. That picture is great! With more and more popularity and the resulting higher competition, the ideas needs to be better every weekend. That keeps us blending!!!
Congratulation Aron ! I’m pleased to see so much entries and so much variety to the theme I proposed. I was hoping for more colours in general but there were really original entries. I especially liked Eric’s one.
If you consider the time constraint, people definitely manage to blend great scenes in such a short amount of time. I think we should thank the devs for this. A few years ago you would need a lot of time to get good results but now there are a lot of efficient tools for the artists to use (sculpting, cycles, simulations, …). And if the UI is not yet beginner-friendly, just thinking of Blender2.2, the release I started with, I’m pretty sure such incredible renders wouldn’t have been possible in a week-end.
Hi Aron, I’m working on a personal project where I’m adding butterflies (morpho blue) to a 3D picture. Have you any tips for me to build a realistic model like the one in your picture? Kind Regards, Giovanni
Hey Giovanni, Thanks. Fist I made the wings using a photo as reference. After that I texture painted the wing from the photo on the plane, Then I sculpted the details of the wings following the texture, A bit like the “how to make cliffs” tutorial from blender guru. The butterfly from the reference has hair on his wings, so i added some particle hairs.
For the body I created the shape roughly, And used particle hair. I colored the body with one color and added a few stripes for the hair color. I hope this helps a bit. If you have questions? I gladly help.
Thanks a lot for the tips. I had hard time understanding if this butterfly was real or computer generated :-)
I am really happy that people say that it looks like a real a photograph. I was going for realism. The only thing that’s a photo is a hdri picture, for the background behind the tree. And most of the textures were made from photo’s.
Great photograph! ;)
That’s a real photo!