Blender | FAST Butterfly Modelling | Tutorial

hey guys and welcome to another blender tutorial in this tutorial i'm going to be showing you guys how to model a very simple butterfly from nothing but a 2d image which i'm going to provide in the description below so you can download this image i'm going to show you where to do that and then essentially in this tutorial i'm just going to show you how to simply model it using some very basic modeling techniques into this butterfly here now this is by no means something that you're going to be seeing really up close this is just a quick dirty asset that you can kind of knock together if you need it maybe like a butterfly as an element in a scene and you can see here this is an example of what i made out of this and it took me something like 25 minutes now i'm not going to be showing how i made the animation but i will kind of go through it a little bit how i set things up but this is really really basic the modeling especially is really basic and easy and we're just taking advantage of a photo as a simple reference and adding some basic modifiers so i hope you guys enjoyed this butterfly tutorial on how to make this and i'll also be putting this blend file including the animation here onto my patreon so you guys want to check that out so uh let's get into this um fun a little butterfly tutorial so before we actually get started with this tutorial you obviously want to download the image we're going to be working with you can use any butterfly but i found one that's really good and it's free i'm going to put a link to this in the description below so it's on pexels you can see just this really nice picture of a butterfly but really you could do this with any butterfly just make sure you get a nice um forward looking shot ideally you could get one from a butterfly at the top and the bottom um it has a little bit more realism depends on where the camera is going to be viewing it from but for this tutorial something like this will give us a lot to work with just go ahead and you know download whatever size you want there so with me i've downloaded my image here just for example i've put it on my desktop and what we're going to do with a new scene open up in blender so i'm using blender 3.0 over here i'm just going to hit a to select everything and x and just delete so we've deleted all of our default items and what i like to do is i just like to you know drag my window to the side i'm just going to go into my front or graphic view i just like to take my image and just drag it simply into the blender viewport so you just drag it in and you can see it's added in as an image plane here like that now if that's selected you can simply go g y and move it back onto y so we're moving it back on the y a little bit just so when we go into our front view and we model something over here it's not embedded in the image here now there are a lot of different ways you can go about modeling this and i know blender has a whole bunch of new notation tools now you can draw out geometry and stuff but for me i'm just going to do it old school i'm just going to go shift a and i'm just simply going to go to my mesh here and i'm going to add in a plane so i'm just going to add in a plane and you can see here we've got a plane i'm just going to tab to go into edit mode to hit tab key and we're in edit mode now with that active and if all this geometry you know active as you can see we're going to go rx90 and hit enter and in fact let's just really just select you know three of these verts so just these three vertices here let's just hit x and just delete those verts so what we have here is just one single vert that is left and we're simply going to take that and we're gonna go g and just move it down to where the wing is here so you can see we got one single little vertex here and now we're gonna do is we're putting it down here in the wing and we're gonna go e to extrude in that front of graphic view and depending on the amount of detail you want you can kind of make it closer or further apart but i'm just going to go with little extrusions like this we can always give it a sub subdivision surface modifier but just roughly keeping it in the out outside part of this we're just in a front view continually hitting e to extrude and just moving it up a little bit and i know there are a lot of other ways you could do this but just something like this just hitting e to extrude moving it along and over here now when it comes to these little parts here you could get in here and do little details by doing little extrusions but for me i'm just going to keep the gaps big like this as long as it's roughly in place that's all we really want it doesn't have to be like precisely like this so i'm extruding down here you know not over doing it just simple little extrusions all the way down and for me this is something i find quite relaxing and meditative so i don't really mind the process it's just kind of fun following a pattern like this now there are two different ways you can do this now quickly show you with my original butterfly here you can see the wing is actually just made out of two parts like this that i did but if you wanted to at this point here if you wanted to be simpler you could just extrude this vert further down this way but for me i'm going to make two little sections because that's actually what a butterfly has this might look like one wing but it actually is two two wing sections so if this vert's still active here as you can see that vert down the bottom we're going to go e to extrude and we're just going to extrude it for this bottom section you can kind of see where it goes just extruding it and coming close to where we started and you can see here is our original vert we're just going to select that one and the original vert we've got those two active and we're going to hit f and that's going to fill it now what we can do is we can hit a to select everything and we're going to go e to extrude s to scale and just scale it a little bit not too much and then if you go control f with that all those verts still selected ctrl f we can go grid fill now if it doesn't do it it's because we don't have an even amount of verts so all you can do is come in here to one of these edges and go ctrl r double click just add in an extra cut and now if you go shift alt and you left click on an edge here it'll loop select these verts and if you now go ctrl f or command f you can go grid fill and it should fill that in now you can come here to the grid fill option and you can mess around with the span and offset and stuff till it kind of makes sense but for me this is kind of okay for what we're doing so if that's all still active i'm just going to go to my smooth tool drag the little gizmo and just kind of smooth that out and there you go there we have that now you could just fill the whole thing in as one face and not have it with all of this geometry here but if you wanted to deform the wing that geometry is going to matter especially if you also want to add a subdivision surface modifier so you can see now we made one really simple wing and if you wanted to you could just you know select this you can go shift d duplicate it rotate it and once again i'm still in my front orthographic view and then you can come here and enable your proportional editing select verts and then go g and move them and if you roll your middle mouse button you can control the fall off you can also come here and make it connected only so it only affects the connected mesh and you can select the verts and you can just move them around and this is kind of like a quick and dirty way of doing it and if you're just trying to make something like a butterfly it's going to be in the background you're not going to see it up close something like this really is fine because it's not going to be a close-up macro shot and that's kind of what my project was that i was intending so i didn't really care this is just about getting a quick and dirty result and what we can do is we can just with any one of these verts selected hit ctrl l and that's just going to select this geometry by itself and then we can go g y and just move it down a bit just so it's not intersecting so there we have the wing so i'm going to quickly show you something really cool now what we can do to give it that wing texture we can quickly go to our modifiers or through our materials go to your materials tab and then click on new and let's just call this this is a bf for butterfly okay whatever you want to call it then we're to come over here to our base color click on this little tab here and let's just give that an image texture now if we come to the drop down we can click on that pexel's pixabay image whatever just click on it the butterfly one we dragged in it should be available here because we dragged our reference image in and now you're not going to see anything but if you hit z and you go materials you still want to see it but what you got to quickly do now is just go to your uv editing and once again just hit z make sure you're in a material preview then hit a to select all of this geometry and then in your front view if you hit u and you go project from view it's going to project it and now over here just simply select the geometry and you can go s to scale it up g to move it and just kind of match it up to the wing it doesn't matter if it's a little bit smaller than it was originally as long as none of these parts here are sticking over and you should be able to see over here because we went z and we went material preview we now have that you can tab out of edit mode and there you have a wing pretty cool and on top of that if you wanted to you could just add a solidify modifier to give a little bit of thickness so you can mess around with that you can also give it a subdivision surface modifier and you can also go to object and enable shades move on that so now you have a really really simple wing so let's go back to our layout and in case you were wondering maybe okay so if you get any of this weird shading stuff going on here like i do over here just come in here to edit mode hit a to select everything and then go alt n and then just go recalculate outside and it'll fix any of that normal issues so now as you can see here we have the wing so if we if we wanted to mirror this all we have to do is go to our modifiers and just give it a mirror modifier now because we started off with a plane and we just deleted all the verts in edit mode our origin point which is this orange dot in the middle and you can see that by going up here making sure origins is enabled that is right in the middle so we add a mirror modifier to that it's perfectly mirrored on the x-axis here which is what we want so if you hit z now and you go material preview you can see our wings so that was really simple we've now made some wings pretty easy don't worry about it not matching up with the background image exactly but let's quickly make the body so let's just quickly select the wing and this is hit h to hide it so we're hitting h and let's make the the insect body it's even simpler we're going to go shift a just add in a cube and we're going to hit z and we're going to go into wireframe then we'll go s to scale that cube down and don't worry about it being exactly in the middle just kind of in fact select your image in the background and then hit g to move it and just move it and try and get it in the middle of that cube and also hit r to rotate it and just roughly line that guy up like that then we're going to select the cube tab into edit mode and in wireframe which can select these verts here and go s to scale them e to extrude to the neck scale e to extrude s to scale that and then e to extrude just this little bit here s to scale and let's just select the side of the face here just these faces here and let's go e to extrude s to scale g to move them in and just move this guy out so we're just making a really basic little model like this and let's just grab these faces here in our front view let's go eat to extrude s to scale and just drag these guys out just kind of roughly matching it up it doesn't have to be perfect and now you can see if you go to your side view it's a little bit skewed so you can just select face here move it out a bit just give it some thickness it doesn't have to be perfect we're just trying to roughly build this so grab that bring that out a bit go to your vert select and just bring this out spend as much time as you want just kind of making it look like the head and then go back to your front orthographic view hit z go into wireframe and let's just select half of the these verts here and let's go s x 0 and hit enter then we're going to go g x and just move them in a bit and now let's go to add and under our modifiers and let's just give it a mirror modifier and you can see now it's mirrored and while we have those faces active in there let's hit x and delete faces and now make sure clipping is enabled on our mirror just select all of these verts and then go g x and move them over till they all kind of clip together so now i have it perfectly mirrored let's select these bottom verts e to extrude s to scale move them in a bit and then just work your way down like this e to extrude one more time down to here and then s to scale g to move it and just bring it in a little bit so all we've created is something like this it doesn't have to be perfect let's give it a subdivision surface modifier just move it out then tab out to object mode and let's go to object and enable shared smooth and now let's just go over to our materials come to the dropdown and give it that butterfly material and now if we're going to go to our uv editing workspace in edit mode here select everything by hitting a and then we're going to go u project from view in our front orthographic view and then once again over here just select the geometry s to scale and then move it around you can also rotate it and just try and match it up to the reference here so something like that should be fine and then you can also come over here at the top enable proportional editing and you can select the verts hit g and you can just use the proportional editing tool to move it over here in this workspace till it all matches up here and as long as you hit z and you go material preview you should be able to see it over here now from the side you're going to get a lot of the stretching but that's okay we're not really going for something that's super realistic we're keeping it just as kind of like a background element something that at a quick glance would look like a real butterfly so now let's go back to our layout and now we can go alt h and unhide the rest of the butterfly if we hit z and we go material preview you can see it's starting to look like something we want to see so let's quickly select the butterfly and let's just go g y and just move it forward a bit like that now that's all looking pretty cool now if you wanted to make the antennae as you can see here in the butterfly you can simply just go into your edit mode there with the butterfly simply just select one of these faces on the eye and then go shift d to duplicate it right click to let go and then go e to extrude just a little bit and then e to extrude that face a little bit more and then just move it in your front view e to extrude or to rotate as to scale just make a little thing like this doesn't have to be perfect just little extrusions and then you can take those go back to uv editing and then just select the whole thing the whole antennae then you can go you project from view and then you can just take the whole thing over here and instead of trying to line it all up with that antenna there you can just simply take it along here somewhere scale it down and rotate it and just try and match it up with one of these veins here and that should look believable enough you can tab out back into your layout and now if we hit z and we go material preview we have something that looks like that pretty cool and now you can grab your wings and you can go to edit mode just select all of the geometry and now you can kind of rotate them a little bit move them back a little bit and just try to make it look a little bit more natural and that's how you make a butterfly so it looks pretty cool and you can like i said you can spend as much time as you want perfecting this you know extra extruding things a little bit nicer but just for a really quick basic model that you can like have sitting somewhere in the background uh that's pretty cool i'm quickly gonna what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna just quickly jump into my original here and i and this is the exact same method i use here but i just spent a little bit more time refining things you can see this is my butterfly here and what i did to animate it is super simple i originally to make the wings be part of the butterfly i simply selected the wings and i held in shift and selected the body and then i just went ctrl p and i made it object keep transform so when i grab the insect body here you can see the wings are following along then what i did is i selected the wings and i just went over to my shape keys and i added two shape keys so bases and then my first shape key here i went into edit mode and i just kind of moved geometry around with the proportional editing tool to make it kind of look like a flap and then i just use this value slider here and i animated it and i went over to my animation here and i added some under my animation curves if i quickly get that could go to my graph editor here i you can see here i added a noise generator to that shape key and to get this kind of random flapping thing going on here it's a very simple kind of way of doing this without having to do too much work and then i just grabbed the body here and i just added a little bit of rotation animation to it just to kind of make it look like like this so just a really quick and dirty little animation and then i just duplicated the butterflies put them in the background added some of these glowing balls and added the background super basic stuff all of this honestly took me like 25 minutes to put this little animation together and the whole process of making this butterfly here is exactly what i just showed you guys in this tutorial so that's how i did it it's a super simple way of getting this asset made and i'm interested to see what you guys are able to make with this so that being said i am also making this file here available on my patreon so this is my original one that comes with the animation but you guys don't have to get it if you want um even just following along with this basic tutorial here will get you some pretty good results and i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial if this is something that isn't really your interest you can always check out some of my other tutorials i really do cover stuff like shape keys animation and modeling in more detail so definitely check out some of my other stuff i'll see you guys next time for another tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 6,150

Rating: 4.9907622 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9, blender quickie, Blender fast tutroial, Ian hubert

Id: e4jqiZO_BqU

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021