Chlorion lobatum

At the beginning of this project, I did research on various insects trying to find one that I was going to visualize. I finally went for the chlorion lobatum because I think it has several aspects that could be interesting to shade: the iridescence of its body, subsurface scattering on the wings and its colors. Here are some of the references I collected:

With the references in mind, I started sculpting in ZBrush from scratch. I tried to go into detail as much as possible. 

After completing the sculpt around 80%, I retopologized the mesh using Maya. I then took it back into ZBrush, projected the details back onto it and finished sculpting.

I started doing the grooms in XGen and exported them into 3ds Max. For the fine fuzz on the body I used VRayFur, and for the leg hairs I used Ornatrix.

Before creating the texture maps, I set up a rough version of the shader so I would be able to see exactly which maps I needed to paint. The texturing process for this project was less linear and a lot of going back and forth between 3ds Max and Substance Painter. In this case, I used Substance Painter to paint maps for the needed textures and also some density or length masks for grooming.

Because of the complexity of the insect's materials, I had to layer multiple shaders using VRayBlendMaterials. The iridescence of the body was achieved using falloff nodes for reflection and working with the thin film thickness values. To achieve more detail, I also added MicroSkin textures from texturingXYZ as micro displacement in some places.

Finally, I put together the scene using assets from Chaos Cosmos and Quixel Bridge. 

Final Renders