Butterfly Prototype

Originally, we were pessimistic about the amount of work required to create the butterfly character for our animation. The wings in particular would be incredibly detailed, and with the appearance of the wings being important, the texturing, materials, and UV mapping would be very complex. The wing animation was also considered to be a problem, as we could not simply rotate the wings and attaching the mesh to a skeleton through weight-painting would be tedious and difficult. Luckily, we managed to come up with solutions for both of these problems within a few hours of work, and an early butterfly model was made this morning as practice for the final.

In order to avoid modeling detailed butterfly wings, we simply created a planar surface and applied a texture with an alpha mask to the material. This prevented any UV mapping work on the wings, as the texture can be applied to a uniform set of polygons, and the alpha mask gave the plane the appearance of being shaped to match the wing texture.

To animate the wings, we applied a set of twist and bend deformers to the planar surface and created a custom GUI. By creating a relationship between the relative position of a GUI element and the various attributes of the deformers, we developed a simple interface which allows us to control the flapping of the wings. The deformers save us an enormous amount of time in rigging effort, and the GUI will save us time in animating the final butterfly.

Prototype Butterfly Control Rig