Dragonfly

My big project, Abzu, I am taking a brief break from (along with the book on OSL, which is going to require some serious postwork). Abzu is going to need a little retopologizing—again—but he's coming along. Sometimes a guy just needs to collect himself to do his best work. So, I switched to this instead, for about three days. Aside from a fun piece of art, it also gave me an opportunity to familiarize myself with new features.

The dew is from me experimenting with geometry nodes in 2.93. There's an argument for the anther, too, but that was relatively very simple as it isn't independently animated. The flower itself used several shape keys for its animation, inclusive of a lattice applied to everything from the stem up. (No armatures though, unlike the dragonfly.)

For the dragonfly itself there was a very mild amount of multiresolution sculpting, and an armature inclusive of root motion to roll it around. The wings themselves were composited on, rendered on a separate layer which a Bokeh was applied to. The Bokeh blur added excessive motion blur to create the illusion of the wings moving faster than they actually are. Other animations included a slight wind sway to the grass blades, and of course a tracked speaker.

If I wanted to improve this, I would probably use a driver to calculate relative velocity of the speaker with respect to the camera, and automate the Doppler effect on the dragonfly. It's pretty "eyeballed" here. I considered adding a little facial expression to him, like a slight eye bulge, but the project needed to be done sometime. (I need to get back to my ½ GB Abzu-and-temple project, after all.) I may also have gone about the facial sculpting a little differently, and spent more time on the furry legs.

The house I grew up on had a pond near it, and these guys would be out every summer. One summer they got so big I swear their abdomens were the size of my index finger. It didn't seem like it should have been possible, but I guess there were a lot of delicious mosquitoes for them that year. They would hum right up to you to say hi, too, and the Doppler on it was real.

Much of the post work, after the compositing, was just done with ffmpeg. Because I'm crazy like that. Apparently.