In today’s 3d art, I present to you Carabus auronitens. Carabus auronitens is a species of beetle in the family Carabidae which was described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1792.
Inspiration
I have always been fascinated by how amber preserves lifeforms elegantly. So I decided to create a piece of art that mimics its beauty. In today’s 3d art, I present to you Carabus auronitens. Carabus auronitens is a species of beetle in family Carabidae which was described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1792.
Closeup renders
Design reference
To design the beetle and amber, I collected many insects in amber references that I liked. From the many images, I decided to work with these two. The details provided me with information such as: how the surface is, amber transparency factor, texture, and how I needed to set my camera to give the sensation of something tiny a beetle.
Tools
I used several tools to work on this project
- Materialize – For generating the ground PBR texture maps.
- Blender – For modeling, texturing lighting, and rendering.
- PureRef – For pasting and referring to the reference images.
Modeling and shading
Amber: Nothing fancy when it comes to the shape. Just a UV sphere pinched a little in sculpt mode. The amber material is where most of the time was spent to make it as realistic as possible. How it interacts with light in terms of reflection, transparency, and refraction. The node setup is quite complex. You can download the project file from here for reference.
Beetle: I simply used a diffuse shader since not much of the beetle details would be visible through the amber.
Floor – It is a plane subdivided several times. Geometry is generated with a normal map. You can download the project file from here for reference.
Lighting
I used an HDRI map for realistic reflections. I added a sun lamp for the shadows and to make the beetle more visible inside the amber.
Rendering
The animation is rendered at 1280 X 720 resolution and 60 fps frame rate.
It took an average of 38 seconds to render one frame at 200 samples and Optix denoiser activated.
Download the project file
Unlocking the download link clicking the like button below. If you have any questions about this project, please leave a comment in the comment section below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1naPjIzF4WK0wBbA-VqelwELndkfokSMY/view?usp=sharing
If you have any questions, put them in the comment section below. Request for project assistance from one of our professional animators here.
Write more, that’s all I have to say.
You definitely know what you’re talking about.
Hi Thurman. Thanks for the observation and advice. We’ll put it into practice in our next blog post. Cheers!!