Butterfly

 

I started making the butterfly for the independent project. 

I first deleted everything from the scene and added a plane. I moved the plane to the side so that one of the edges lined up with the origin lines. I then set the origin of the plane to the 3d cursor so I could reflect the shape from the middle of the scene. 

Next, I started shaping the plane into half of the butterfly. I used scaling and loop cuts to achieve this. 

Once I was happy with the shape I added a mirror modifier as well as solidify and bevel. I also created the body, head, legs and antennae. I tried to use a curve to make the antennae but I think I did something wrong so it didn't work how I thought it would. For the legs, I reused the antennae shape and added an array modifier.

After this, I started texture painting. I had some problems with this at first because I wasn't able to change the colour of the brush, I'm not sure how I fixed this problem but I referred to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnRQhH3fEDY That I had found for the ChopChopWok project but I didn't end up texture painting anything. Since a butterfly is multicoloured I thought this would be a good use for texture painting. After painting the colours I realised that both sides of the wings were the same. To fix this I UV projected the wings after applying the solidify modifier however the texture was now too big for two wings to fit on the texture image so I had to edit the texture in photoshop (I had also wanted to make some adjustments in photoshop so this was helpful) I scaled down the wind texture and duplicated it. I then changed the colour tone of the 2nd wing to be more brown coloured. I then saved the texture and went back into Blender to adjust the UV projections so they fitted correctly on the texture sheet. 

I then set the texture as a material and set it for all of the butterfly parts.

After this, I tried rigging the butterfly, Blender 2.80 Tutorial: How To Add Bones To An Object. - YouTube In this video they parent the bones by automatic weight. This worked however the back surface of the wing glitches through the front, so I might end up using shape keys instead.