Children of Earth

Children of Earth

Autodesk Maya, Renderman, Adobe Substance 3D Painter, Mudbox, XGen Interactive, MASH, Nuke X

This is the first lighting-rendering project of the second year at ESMA. We had to choose an insect, model and texture it in an organic environnement. I chose to do an Europpean Bee (Apis Mellifera) because it's in my opinion the only cute insect.

References

Most of the images comes from Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist.

Modeling

I modeled the bee entirely on Maya. I used cube primitives for the head and the chest. The wings are made from a primitive plane. I sculpted the arms with the sculpting tools of Maya.

Texturing and fur

Most of the texturing was made with Adobe Substance 3D Painter. I created some displace and bump maps with Mudbox. Finally, I've created the fur with XGen Interactive.

Render time : 4h16

Color map of the fur.

Rigging

Composition

This part was a big challenge because I didn't want to reproduce an existing image like my classmates did. I wanted to create a fully original image with a story to tell. I wanted to convey an ecological message.

The idea was to depict a bee on a flower under an electric pylon. That's all. The bee is living it's life with no idea that mankind is slowly encroaching on it's territory. Our way of life fed by electricity is threatening the bees while they are essential for our planet.

The composition with the flower didn't work so I replaced it with lavender which was better for the camera angle. It had to be a a low-angle shot so the bee and the viewer are dominated by the pylon which seems more threatening. I tried several orientations for the pylon to make it clearly visible even though it's out of focus.

Environnement

I modeled the lavender on Maya and added sculpt with Mudbox. The fur is XGen Interactive and I made dust particles with MASH.

Final

Some adjustments were made on Nuke X.

Render time : 10h48

Thank You for watching !