Butterfly Bunny

I decided that I wanted to make something cute and, when looking for inspiration, I came across a drawing of mine from 2017, of a bunny with butterfly wings, in grass with glowing orbs/fairy lights. I chose to recreate that drawing in CG, and the above render was the result of that.

I would say that the drawing is more inspiration for the render, rather than a direct reference. I changed up my render from the original drawing quite a bit; for instance, my render isn’t as green, and has stronger lighting than the drawing. This is because my drawing skills in 2017 were not as nice as what I wanted for my render.

Left=My Render Right=My Drawing from 2017

I am responsible for the concept, texturing, grooming, lighting, rendering, and compositing. I got the bunny model from Turbosquid, and the wings models from CGTrader. I created this piece in Maya, rendered it with Arnold, and compositing it in Nuke.

Grooming

Bunny

This was my first time grooming an animal, and I used xGen Groomable Splines for it. For the bunny’s whiskers, I used Splines, controlled through “Placing and Shaping Guides”. Below shows the type of splines that I used for the bunny fur:

Having never groomed animal fur before, I of course looked up tutorials online. I found this video series and this video series to be the best for me. Below shows my bunny model with the final amount of splines for the fur, as well as the guides for the whiskers:

I used a density map to paint out the fur on areas such as the inner ears and eyes.

I painted my own texture map for the bunny’s fur. It is a dark gray and white pattern, and I included some purple as well, so that the wings and fur could blend together a bit better. The diffuse portions of the eye and ears were part of the original texture map that came with the model. My texture map is shown below:

Grass

I used Splines to groom the grass, following this tutorial. It is xGen grass created using expressions. Below shows my choice of xGen:

I used rand expressions to bend the grass randomly, and give it random length, shown below:

Rather than use the aiStandard Hair shader, I decided to shade the grass with Maya’s hairPhysicalShader. I made this decisions because I knew that I could control the root and tip colors more easily with the hairPhysicalShader, giving the grass more realistic variations. My shader settings are shown below: