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Nature's Wonders Sneak Peek Thread

Szark

Awesome


1: Grab a free leaf texture map preferably with a transparent background.
2: Load leaf map in to Photoshop/Gimp Etc.
3: Make new layer full black.
4: Duplicate leaf layer. Move above the full Black layer.
5: Make this new layer black and white and adjust so the leaf is Pure White.
6: Duplicate White Leaf Layer and hide the Original White (This is you back up so make new shapes).
7: Now use the eraser with a soft edge brush and erase until you go a nice small piece of white.
8: Now save out the small white part and Black background as a Jpg. This is your first Opacity/Trans/Cutout map
9: Open DS/Poser etc

10: Load a Plane, small. You can make it smaller when done.
11: Load leaf diffuse
12: Load your first opacity map in the right slot.
13: Scale and position.

This was my process for doing the leaf parts for the ants above.
 

Ken Gilliland

Dances with Bees
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Yes, a morphable leaf chunk is planned.

I think I've finished the modeling part (and almost the UVing). Next, will be chopping up the model into body parts and rigging. There will be quite a few morphs since the head, thorax, abdomen and mandible shapes vary quite a bit from species to species.

ant1.JPG ant2.JPG ant3.JPG ant4.JPG
 

mininessie

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Your toads are amazing. The ant line up will be impressive as well. Great idea. Man you're really moving along Ken.

Here's a mini watercolor painting I made of one of your ants.

View attachment 28858


Might be cool if you added in a leaf prop or a stick or some thing.
wonderful mini painting!



1: Grab a free leaf texture map preferably with a transparent background.
2: Load leaf map in to Photoshop/Gimp Etc.
3: Make new layer full black.
4: Duplicate leaf layer. Move above the full Black layer.
5: Make this new layer black and white and adjust so the leaf is Pure White.
6: Duplicate White Leaf Layer and hide the Original White (This is you back up so make new shapes).
7: Now use the eraser with a soft edge brush and erase until you go a nice small piece of white.
8: Now save out the small white part and Black background as a Jpg. This is your first Opacity/Trans/Cutout map
9: Open DS/Poser etc

10: Load a Plane, small. You can make it smaller when done.
11: Load leaf diffuse
12: Load your first opacity map in the right slot.
13: Scale and position.

This was my process for doing the leaf parts for the ants above.

Yes, a morphable leaf chunk is planned.

I think I've finished the modeling part (and almost the UVing). Next, will be chopping up the model into body parts and rigging. There will be quite a few morphs since the head, thorax, abdomen and mandible shapes vary quite a bit from species to species.

View attachment 28870 View attachment 28871 View attachment 28872 View attachment 28873
beautiful scene!

I do have another small conforming prop I'll try to get uploaded to my freebies once I finish cleaning it up and making the DS version...

View attachment 28875
wow! cool!
 

Ken Gilliland

Dances with Bees
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Yesterday, my wife asked what my plans were... I told her I had plans to dismember my ant (for rigging). After an alarmed look on her face, I had to explain it wasn't that type of "Aunt". In any case, I did the rigging yesterday. I chose the center Thorax piece (where the middle legs are) as the base, so the model bends nicely for poses... so many of the older insect models were rigged back to front making posing extremely difficult. The Abdomen(rump)/Petiole(skinny part) bend really nicely to do a proper sting.

Today, I started the morphs and here's the first of the species compare to the base model...

firstmorph.jpg
 

Ken Gilliland

Dances with Bees
HW3D Exclusive Artist
I've been finding out some interesting (and disturbing) things about ants... Did you know that if you combined the weight of every single human to every single ant in the world, they'd be about equal? That's a lot of ants...

Here's one third of the species that will be in the set... I will be including a "Them" sized ant figuring it could be used for riding or end of the world... your choice ;)

ant.jpg
 
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