Dragonfly

Above : 3rd revisit of this mech/robot insect (2023)

For this render, first the mesh had to be cleaned up as it lacked symmetry and had multiple overlapping/intersecting faces. Looking at reference images of dragonflies in nature I decided to change the colour from orange to blue, additionally I decided to take it out of a lab setting and place it into nature to give it a better sense of scale.

The tree stump is a paid asset from Poligon and the background is a hdr image of Epping Forest by Andreas Mischok from Poly Haven

Above : Sketches, Progress and Older renders of the DragonFlyer.

This machine dragonfly was one of the earlier mechimals that I created (2017) and at that time other than the water globe it was placed against a white background. This was ok when I was including a set of the different views in the main image, but when I revisited the render (blender version 2.79) I wanted to focus on the dragonfly itself and so I added an environment of a simple science lab layout.

The materials for this render also use the (at time of writing) experimental new ‘principled’ shader added to blender in 2.79 (release candidate version). There are the usual metal materials used, but this also uses a couple of metallic car paint materials, which now make use of the clearcoat setting in the new shader.

The water globe uses a tinted ‘glass’ shader with a bump displacement controlled by a Musgrave texture. The other non standard material is used in the wing rotors and is a blackbody material set to a temperature range of1000 - 2000c, with a slight glow added to it post render.

Below : Side image of finished model, slightly posed

Below : Front image of finished model, slightly posed

Below : Back image of finished model, slightly posed

Below : Top and Underside image of finished model, slightly posed