Electric Blue Bottle

Come fly with me

If I’m remembering correctly this was the second mechimal I created (mech-bee, being the first) and was a case of the name popping into my head and then designing around it.

The inner part of the thorax was modelled around various images of engine parts, whereas the head was more based around an actual blue bottle head but mechanised.

Around these inner parts I modelled solid shapes that fit more or less snuggly around the body and head, but also kept the general insect look, once happy with the shape I cut away sections of them to create 2D shells which I then added a solidify modifier to transform them into 3D structures. The abdomen was took the reverse approach whereby I modelled the outer form first and then adding a mechanical inner structure to it.

The legs are pretty much just pipes and ball sockets, they were moved into position with an armature but the blue bottle itself is not really rigged and the legs themselves are mirrored so only one side has articulation, the feet are modelled more closely to fly feet.

The wings loosely follow the outline of fly wings but are more just sci-fi propellor-jet things.

I quite like the gallery images which have just the two material colours showing the inner and outer structures as it reminds me a bit of the wooden dinosaur kits I built now and again when I was younger.

All the materials in the main image have also been reworked using the new (at time or writing) principled shader in blender 2.79, with the body having a lighter blue colour merging into a darker blue controlled by a vertex paint map. Additionally the fly was originally just standing on a white surface surrounded by a shallow ring, but for this re-worked version I copied across the ‘lab’ scene from Dragonfly and modified the platform a little.

Firefly

This was me being lazy, I wanted to create a firefly but didn’t want to model a new insect (even though firefly and blue bottle flies are not the same shape) so I basically re-textured the electric blue bottle model. No changes were made to the actual mesh, though I did add an emission shader to the abdomen section.