Schmecheling

I’m a beautiful butterfly

Butterflies are simple, I can make a mech butterfly in no time . . . yeah not so much.

The initial part I started working on was the Abdomen, but my first attempts were just too organic insect and not enough mech insect, then it became more mech but moved too far away from the butterfly appearance, finally to get something that felt right I moved away from reference images and relied more on ‘sketching’ and tweaking in 3D.

Next up was the Thorax, this was more easy to get to the point where I was happy with it, form wise it is quite similar to the dragonfly thorax, the base mesh used for it was actually a ico sphere instead of the usual sphererised cube. While experimenting I did like the look of the thorax when I extruded the individual faces but felt it wasn’t a fit for this mechimal, something to keep in mind for a future project though.

The head was pretty straight forward as I’d decided earlier on to not try and mimic a butterfly head and instead went for a more security camera type form. Alot of the reference images for security cameras seemed to have antenna, which in a nod to the butterfly head here are replaced by the butterfly proboscis.

The next challenge was the wings, my initial concept wanted to have fixed rear wings and more ornithopter type front wings, but solid wings just looked bulky and wrong, I then tried cutting holes in the wings but again it just didn’t look right. After sleeping on it I took a different approach, instead of solid wings I switched to a wing frame (made using curves converted to mesh), with this frame holding the standard fallback of sci-fi hover disk things.

The bulk of the body just uses a black metallic shader with a couple of other areas highlighted with slightly different metallics for some contrast. For the coloured areas I started with quite a wide range of colours, but this got a bit messy so I cut back on the range of colours to stick to a more blue/green scheme (with a couple of red patches). The blue/green fade on the ‘wings’ is controlled with a vertex paint map and the hover disk tops use a shader I created for an eyeris.  

The lightening and glowing red sections (and the camera eye) use blackbody heat nodes mixed with the emission node to control the colour, with a blur added to them later in compositing.

While trying various lighting setups I found a setup which projected a shadow onto the landing pad the schmecherling is sitting on which I really liked, so most of the tweaking after this point was to get a lighting level that kept the shadow but was dark enough for the lighting to still show up nicely.