Why?
At some point I realised that many of the arc viz animations we were doing at work were too ‘still’ – trees weren’t moving, birds weren’t flying, there was no sense of the space being alive. I thought I would create a little library of basic elements that we could use in the background of animations so there was some kind of movement – little things that might draw the eye ; I thought butterflies might be nice so I had a crack at creating one.
Basic butterfly test – DOF, motion blur etc.
How?
I remembered seeing a documentary about butterfleis where it was explained they have an autonomic mechanism that causes them to jerky around in mid flight to avoid predators – a predator cannot accurately predict where the butterfly will be when it strikes.
Armed with that tidbit of information I placed the butterfly on a dummy object with a noise position controller; the wings were animated with an out of range controller and I threw on a flex modifier.
After getting a basic butterfly working I wanted to see it in a basic scene – to work out how fast it should be moving and to get it to scale etc.
Butterfly test in situ.
Can I see the finished product?
Unfortunately I don’t have permission to show any of the finished projects where the butterfly was used, though I’m sure I will get one up in future!
