Robotic Bee

I had trouble coming up with an idea for this instructable. I didn't know which colour to pick. At first, I was just going to make a flower. Then I thought I should give the flower a friend, which I decided should be a bee. Unfortunately, it is very challengeing ot make a realistic looking bee, so I decided to make everything robotic.

All you need to make something like this is

A computer

Blender Software

PhotoShop

Wifi

When making things that you want to get really close to, you want to gather as much reference as possible. First, I started by picking the kind of bee I wanted, and finding a bunch of images to use of it. I also looked for some flower images. I wanted to find flowers with big petals because I knew I wanted the bee to sit nicely on them.

I use a program called PureRef to always have my reference open so I can look at it while I block out the model. There are a bunch of different ways to block out an object like this. I used a combination of splines and primitive shapes. Splines for things like the butt of the bee, because I know it's not gonna be a perfect cylinder. So I use the splines to make a rough outline of the butt, which I can extrude into a cylinder. For the legs, I just did basic primitives because I know I want them to be more rigid and robotic.

I found this image of a flower I liked, in Blender, I traced out the shape of a peddle, then gave it some thickness. At this point, it is just a flat shape, so I used a lattice, which is a simple object like a box, that can deform a more complex shape that you parent it to. So I used the lattice to give the pedals some curve and shape. Then I used an array modifier in a circle to make the flower shape. To make the flower look more like a piece of metal, I made the middle a screw, which I thought was a nice touch.

To go along with the robot theme, I chose to keep the bees' colours very basic. I think it makes the bee look more futuristic and brings more attention to the flower. For the flower, I wanted to make it a nice purple; it's a nice colour that goes really well with the yellow of the centre of the flower. I also added some imperfection textures to the flower petals and bee's eye to give it some more detail. Everything was done in Blender with the basic BSDF shader by changing the metallic and roughness settings.

I first started by adding an HDRI to the scene. These are great to get accurate lighting and shadows, especially since my scene is set outside. I also added some depth of field to give it more of a macro look. I rendered the image in 4k, using the Cycles render engine in Blender.

I didn't like the initial colour that came out of Blender, so I took the final image into Photoshop. Im not the most experienced in Photoshop, so I went into the camera RAW filter and tweaked the sliders until I got something that I liked.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the final result, to be able to create a complex yet simple image with a free software is very gratifying. The nice thing is that there is a whole compositing tab in Blender, so you could achieve a very similar look without Photoshop.

I think my submission demonstrates the colours of the rainbow quite well, heavily focusing on the colour purple but being evened out by the more neutral white Bee colour.