Third 3D stamp idea - Leaf Bug

For my final 3D stamp idea I decided to create a bug, this came to me in the middle of another class and when I got home I got straight on it, my inintial idea was to make a fly but changed that quite early on.

The first thing I done was make three geo-sphere's centre then at X=0 Y=0 Z=0, I then made the second sphere smaller the the first and again the third sphere smaller again, this gave me a simple shape, I also lowerd to segmant to 16 and will explain why later.

I did a quick render of this and was happy with the results.

Next I created the legs for my bugs, as I have no experiance in the Bone tool I used an easier option buy using small sphere's as joints then using cones as the leg's after, a bit of tweaking and I got them in the right place, I made four legs all together.

Once I had finished with the leg's I started with the materials, the first material I made was for my leg's This was created buy using Raytrace and the shading turned to Phong, I then changed the colour to a light brown using diffuse, I then went onto add map's I used these maps:-

.Diffusion - Splat
.Bump - Smoke
.Displacement - Noise

Using these maps and fiddleling with the setting's I got my desired shape I finaly added the bump selection with the smoke map to get a more random material, This was added to the legs, I used the same material for the plane surface but changed the colour but made this a darker brown to made a rock-like surface, I tweaked a few map's to make it slightly different.

Once I was happy with the result I went onto modeling and giving the Bug more detail, I started and the front and using inset and move tool's made a dip for the eye socket, using the same technique with a little brevaling and extrusion I created the sharp "horn's" that stick out of the head of my Bug.

But after looking at the shape of these and looking at pictures of bug's I noticed there never straight so applying a bend and noise modifier bent them into a more random and realistic position, I was finaly happy with the result.

Next I went ot model the Second sphere that has the "wings" in it, this took a little time as editing in polygon mode then turbosmoothing with the bend modifier already activated gave me one perspective in polymode, but when I applied Smoothing the shape was completly different and at the wrong angle, I to get around this I simply made the polygon shape Desired then smoothed and just bent it into place =)

To the the wing shape I Inset a triangular polygon from the sphere and moved it up, I then copied this again with a smaller Inset, I then Extruded this to 10, I then selected the side polygons and Inset that to create a smaller rectangular polygon, this i again extruded to 10, after tubosmoothing, rotating and bending alot I got my desired shape, this was made alot easier buy using a sphere with a small amount of polygon's and said at beginning, the fwer I had the easier it was to manipulate and edit.

For the last shpere I simply selected the five top polygons, Inset them and the breveled to create a sort of "armour" or "shell" effect for the bug, I then created the bug "defence" which is a stink gland which can be seen in the picture below, I then added an extra bit of "armour" under this "gland" A quicker render and a little bit more tweaking and this was the Back view of my
bug:-

Here You can see the "armour" better and the "gland" under in







Once I was happy with this I went on to add the green leafy texture shown on the bug, this took some time using many different maps, the maps used are as follow:-

.Ambient - Speckle
.Diffuse - Noise
.Reflect - Smoke
.Specular Colour - Smoke
.Bump - Smoke

I then changed the colours to dark and light green with hints of black and white and the material couldnt of came out better, I was pleased with the result, finaly only one more thing was needed, The eyes, This was the easiest piece to make and simply consisted of a tiny sphere (Radius of 1) , I then moved it into position in the eye socket's made at the begining, I then had to make them look more like bug eyes, so using a simple method similar to that used to make my micro-organism cell's I breveld at a very small scale (0.02) and then turbosmoothed, this is the final shape of the eye:-


Here is the renderd image of the eye, I tried to get it to look as much like a bug's eye as possible but at such a small scale this was the best I could create, to get the colour I used the same material as the Leaf but changed the colour's and added an extra map:-

.Specular Colour - Noise

Then tweaking with the illumination settings and colours I got this redish-blue colour.



Once I was 100% happy with this model I added a Skylight, changed the ammount of light and intesity to give this more of a realistic scene of three bugs crawling around in the dark.

Here is a final renderd image of the scene:-

Here you can see the three bugs lit up buy the skylight, I even put one half in the light half out to see what it looked likeed and the image below is what I chose.





















I was very pleased at the result for this and look forward to using more lights and further improving on materials!!

cheers for reading =)

AJ