Making Digital Fireflies

I don't know about you, but when I think of fireflies, I think of a mysterious glow and catching them in my hands during the very beginning of summer. Pesticides and development have been harming the growth of this species, and there are less and less of them each year.

That being said, welcome to the tutorial! I won't go into much detail about each step, so this one is more of an overview of how I made this model than a step-by-step tutorial for you to follow along. There is a ton of documentation on the internet for any terms that I use and you don't understand, or anything that makes no sense if you do want to follow along. If you are new here, welcome! I hope this tutorial doesn't scare you away! Maybe you'll learn a little about how blender works

This tutorial will go over some of the character creation process for my (somewhat) realistic firefly here. I'll talk about modeling, texturing, and rigging my little firefly character, and make a small scene to show him off!

Let the fun begin.

A somewhat chunky PC - generally, the more complicated your project is, the harder it will be to process. If you are losing a lot of frames, you could try using lower resolution textures or not subdividing as much. Sometimes it's just slow!

A FREE copy of blender (I used 4.0 but the version shouldn't matter too much)

I started out by collecting reference photos for each angle. The hardest part for me was trying to find some pictures for the top of the body without the wings. I settled for some underside photos and a few of the fireflies in flight, which let me guess what the tops of the body segments looked like. In Blender, I imported them as references and also gathered a Pureref collage, so that I could look at photos of slightly different species/breeds/versions.

These images were all found on google.com and pinterest.com.

While making the firefly body parts, I kept thinking of those bandsaw videos where they cut the wood one way, then the other, sand it down, and have a finished statue. To model this firefly, I "cut" out one shape, extruded it up, and shaped it to what I needed by adding subdivisions, sculpting, and moving some vertices. Reshaping was the hardest part, but if you're careful it could be pretty easy. I repeated this process for each segment of the firefly body and its wings. I'm sure there was an easier way of doing it, but this one worked for me.

Of course, I duplicated some of them so that I wasn't remaking what I didn't need to, and I also highly recommend using mirror modifiers to save yourself a bit of work. If you want a tip, going back after you apply the modifier and roughing up/moving around the sides that were mirrored make it look more natural. Hard surface modeling is difficult, and I had a lot of trouble getting it all smooth looking.

The parts I found the hardest were the neck areas, and the spots where the legs joined with the body. For those, I added an icosphere with a few subdivisions, and sculpted it into shape. I think they could be better, but hopefully, it won't be very visible! I also used another icosphere to sculpt the little joints for the legs to connect to.

In the end, we don't have a perfect overly detailed model, but with some textures and posing, hopefully it'll work out!

The first thing I do is apply all my modifiers - mirror modifiers and subdivision surface modifiers don't work well with unwrapping and painting on textures. Another thing that would help with some errors is applying location, rotation, and scale.

Once I got all this out of the way, I painted black and white textures onto the body segments so that I could map where I wanted the glow to be, and where I could separate different colors/textures. Above I have a picture of what all this looks like in black and white. This was done in texture paint mode - I unwrapped everything, added a new flat color texture, and then used the tools to paint pattern into it. This all basically just gave me a colorless version of what I hoped the final product to be. The only part I decided to paint color directly onto was the head, because it took multiple colors and only a single shader.

Now that I have the base of color and pattern, I added bumpy texture and smudged some of my colors together to make it look a little more natural and less like it was painted on with a solid brush.

I put some of my texture trees above, so you can see how I set some of it up to get the look I wanted. There is definitely no one way to do this part, and you can easily change how it all looks as much as you want.

It felt wrong to do all this work to create a firefly model, and not learn anything about the creature that this is all based on! Here's some (hopefully accurate) firefly facts that I learned after a little bit of research

Fireflies use their lights to attract mates, warn off predators, and communicate. In some firefly species, male fireflies will fly around while females wait in trees, flashing to him when she sees a potential mate. Firefly lights are also incredibly efficient! Where incandescent bulbs only emit 10% of their energy as light and the rest as heat, fireflies will use a much larger portion of their energy for light only. This makes them cooler to the touch.

Did you know that firefly larvae glow too? They've been seen to light up in response to physical stimuli like vibrations, motion, or similar things.

Fireflies are also, unfortunately, declining in population. Light pollution, habitat loss, and overuse of pesticides are leading factors for their troubles. If you have a garden, consider setting aside some undisturbed space for native plants and soil that fireflies and firefly larvae can live in. If you have extra lights that you leave on overnight, consider putting them on a timer so they turn off automatically.

Rigging is incredibly annoying, so I won't go into a ton of details here. There's a bunch of different resources out there about how it's done, and many different ways to go about it. For the scene that I ended up going with, I didn't need much rigging, just a simple standing pose and antenna reposition. Since a firefly is surprisingly not super flexible and is very segmented, I only really needed a few bones.

If you're not intending to do much with this model outside of a standing pose, you don't need to do much rigging, but if you're really ambitious and you want to go for a flying animation, you'll need to have a complex rig. Go for it!

I started the process with applying any of my modifiers that are left unapplied. Then, I joined all the bug's meshes together and parented the armature to this big mesh with automatic weights. The most annoying part of rigging a character is definitely weight painting. Repainting the heat maps on all of the vertex groups definitely takes some work.

I didn't do anything fancy here, I basically added a handful of lights to light up the scene, put a darkened image of a forest behind the firefly, and downloaded and duplicated a fern image that I found online. I rendered in Cycles, which meant that I needed to use a post processing bloom effect, which you can find tons of tutorials for online and I have a screenshot of above. After that, I put them all together and tried to make a nice composition. Lots of tweaking - I think I rendered a dozen times before I liked what I saw.

I hope that you learned something from this tutorial! Even if you didn't follow along, I hope it taught you something. Maybe you learned something new about Blender - or fireflies!

Comment your favorite firefly fact :)