Aedes aegypti

Background

This is one of my older projects which I started some time around late 2018. Over the years, I've gone back to redo and update this model as I improved my skills and knowledge of 3D art (I stopped working on it early 2020) I chose a mosquito because I studied biology in my undergrad and acquired an interest in parasitology.

Software used

• Blender
• Substance Painter
• Substance Designer
• Gimp

Process

My process was pretty straightforward for this project. I split the model into 3 parts (head, thorax, and abdomen) and blocked out the major morphological features to make sure they were in the right places, and the proportions were accurate (I intentionally made the head larger however). I then sculpted over it, manually retopologized and UV mapped the model (all in Blender). I used substance painter and Blender nodes for texturing. In an update I added a shape key to the abdomen so I could animate it engorging with blood. I created a simple procedural material in Blender to simulate what the abdomen would look like as it fills up with blood. (see video below)

I later added the hairs, mainly to experiment with alpha textures and the "shells" technique for creating the illusion of fur. I'll likely come back to this mosquito in the future and redo most of it to create a higher quality asset for a future project.

some notes:

• The wings are just placeholders, I was so focused on the weird thorax morphology that I completely forgot mosquitoes had wings until I created my first render, so I stil need to create them.

• The hair textures on the antennae and limbs are just place holders as well. I didn't want to use some free hair alphas so I was going to render my own hair strands, but ran out of free time and never got around to it.