Brazilian Tree Hopper - my Insect Image

[robcat2075]

I thought I was ready to model a realistic insect but there were many details of this struggled with and wish i had done better on.

 

This is actually a combination of a cicada that I had a specimen of to study, a Brazilian Tree Hopper which is known for the elaborate structures that grow on its head and a firefly.

 

One of my aims was to texture it with materials rather than bitmaps..

 

On my Cicada I noticed that the wings have a cellular pattern that is bunched up where the wing joins the body, then expands to follow the curve of the front edge of the wing and ends perpendicular to the trailing edge of the wing.

 

 

There is no material that will do that right out of the box but I figured i could apply a cellular material to a rectangular shape and then morph that rectangle with a pose into the wing shape and that woudl morph the material pattern with it.

 

This clip show the Pose going from 0 to 100%

 

I also used Render as Line on the front and back edges to make those more visible.

 

WingMorph.mov

 

I used a similar ploy to apply a cylindrical gradient to the not-cylindrical abdomen structure...

 

AbdomenMorph.mov

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a full HD with some additional development.

The text is a screen capture from the online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. I stamped that as a color map and a blurred version of it as a bump map to give the appearance that the typeset letters are slightly impressed into soft paper. I also added a bump material to roughen the surface up overall.

That is just barely visible in this HD render.

 

(click thru to see full size)

 

Here is a cross-eye 3D version with some DOF...

 

 

And lastly, here is a final-to-wireframe clip that you can scrub back-and-forth on to examine the modeling.

 

InsectFinalToWire.mov