Before final submission, I’ve given myself a task of completing one final 3D composition, this time related to the emissive light and inspired by the shape from Mateusz Lengling. I wanted to create something at least slightly connected to one of the compositions that I will be making in the next term.

I’ve created a box made of glass, glowing, fractured and emissive surfaces. Inside, I’ve placed a few butterfly models. Each of the butterflies is a copy of one main model, consisting of the 4 separate wing segments, antennas and the body.

“Motyl” stands for butterfly in Polish, “czulki” for the antennas, and “trzon” for the core. It’s not very clear but in my workflow it’s sometimes just easier to use the native language. The core is made of an edited capsule, with flattened endings and for the wings, I’ve used a combination of the Bezier Pen tool and Extrude, to fill the shape. In the past, I had big problems with filling the outline, as it would always create weird polygons, which I couldn’t edit. One of the sources which I can’t remember, explained that it’s only XY camera view, which allows to make Pen tool outlines and Extrude them without any issues. After this step, I used a Symmetry effector and Split, to make both wings separate segments. Antennas are a result of simple Bezier + Sweep. You can’t really see the effectors on the object list, as I used the “Current state to object” option, to make the list a bit more organised. The walls of the box are made of simple cubes.

In terms of materials, I used three main variations:

– Material 1 for two sides of the box, with Luminance and Color on. In the Color section, I’ve applied a marble texture, which is barely visible, but adds that subtle detail, when you zoom in

– Material 2 for two other sides, which is meant to mimic real glass, which is also fractured with the Voronoi Fracture effector

– Material 3 for the Butterflies with marble texture and bump map that I’ve assembled in Adobe Photoshop. I also added a Displacer in order to add the imperfections to the surface.

I then simply copied the butterfly model multiple times and changed the wing angle, to add dynamism and diversity. There are also two area lights adding some extra luminosity and luminance intensity.

The element that I wanted to improve but didn’t have enough time for was more random placement of the texture on wings, which looks a bit repetitive.