It all started with a phone call. Some friends of mine were leaving town and shifting back to France, and I was left wondering what I could possibly give them as a parting gift. An international move is no simple task and so giving my friends a domesticated Indian elephant or anything similarly cumbersome was out of the question. I would have to stick to something simple like a card – easy to carry, and it can say and mean so much if done properly.

It had to be really special though, so I thought I would up the ante and make it a pop up card. Paper crafts have been an obsession of mine since well before I can remember. I’ve always loved the feeling of creating something out of seemingly nothing and creating three dimensions out of two. In recent times all my paper projects have been heavily based on computer layouts and imagery, but due to time constraints on this one I decided to go caveman and create this card in the good old-fashioned digital-free way that I used in a time before keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The experience was extremely rewarding and I think everyone should do this sort of non-digital creative work on occasion to jolt your thinking a little. Here are some general pointers on how you can go about it for best results, along with the story of my pop up card about ‘home’.

1] Brain storm an idea

Every good piece of creative work is based on a good concept, or at least an appropriate one. In the case of my pop up card, I knew it had to be relevant to the situation. Random cute puppies or kittens (as cute as they can be) just would not do. I myself have shifted across borders on four occasions in my lifetime, so I do have some idea of what it feels like. Shifting is more than a change of address, and it often begs the question of what or where home actually is. So I knew that to mean something, this card needed to be about home. Now the next step was to figure what was going to be in it.

I don’t know about you, but when I am faced with this sort of question, my brain switches into unconscious solo brainstorming mode. What that means is that the cogs in my head go into over drive and somewhere in the back of my brain, I look for a solution to the problem. It doesn’t stop until an appropriate solution is stumbled upon or formulated.

At 5:30 am one morning I sat up, suddenly lucid in my bed. I reached for a notebook that was close by and scratched out a few words that were hovering about on the edges of my consciousness. Unwittingly I had formulated the last line of a little rhyming piece of prose. The next day I went back to my half incoherent scrawls and slowly filled in the many lines that would lead to the divined closing sentence. In the end I had the content I had been looking for.

2] Scribble. Doodle. Sketch.

Always scribble, always doodle, always sketch. This is something that we modern computer junkies often discount, jumping straight into our expensive creative software suites. That is usually the beginning of the end of truly outstanding ideas, because everything comes out looking so “beautiful” from the first draft and we forget to ask ourselves whether what we are creating is actually good beyond the pretty surface.

After I had come up with the words for my card, I knew I needed a visual representation of my idea of home. I wrote out my thoughts and finally settled on a simple iconic sketch of home that I came up with along the way. This would serve as my blueprint. While I wasn’t overly concerned with following my initial drawing with precision and accuracy, having a basic layout idea gave me the confidence to forge ahead whenever I doubted the next step.

So always sketch and plan ahead. Not only does it clarify your ideas for your finished piece but it also often brings to the forefront flaws in your idea which you might not otherwise have caught until much later.

3] Use the resources and materials you have

You can often find a wealth of materials for any crafts at home. Once again, trying to use at least some materials that you have forces you to think in new tangents and often leads to ideas and solutions that you would not have come up with if you were depending on 160gsm glossy photo inkjet paper as the solution to all your problems.

A pop up card works best when the card has a certain stiffness to it. When I set out to try out materials and designs for my pop up card, I ransacked the stack of paper in my home that was waiting to be sent for recycling. This of course included everything from paper bags, to cardboard boxes, to miscellaneous scraps.

I came across a shoe box which had the right consistency for the card, and quite by chance it had a rich blue colour which inspired the use of the same rich blue as a sky in my pop up landscape. The pale green grass base also happened because my recycling stack had old green coloured paper bags which I used as a surface to mock-up my design.

4] Experiment and play

Part of my digging through stacks of recycling paper was simply playing around with what I found and seeing if and how I could use a particular colour or thickness of paper. This sort of random play with the materials at hand is an important aspect of paper crafts. Since the material is the whole and soul of this kind of work, a bit of experimentation allows the material to suggest it’s own answers to your creative questions.

But, this goes beyond materials. While sketches and plans are all well and good, when it comes down to execution, some plans simply don’t work because you’ve miscalculated something or you simply haven’t come up with the best solution. In my case, for a while I was considering creating a 180 degree pop up where a full 3D cube-house would stand on the flat opened card. I made good progress in that direction, but my rough paper experiments with it convinced me that I just hadn’t thought it out deeply enough to execute well in the time I had. My roughs of the 90 degree structure however, did work well, and so the decision was taken based on proof rather than on conjecture.

5] Be spontaneous

At some point when working on pop ups and other pieces of paper craft, you run out of plans and decisions. Then it is time to take the paper bull by the horns and simply make a few brave cuts into the heart of the matter.

Once I had decided on the idea, the colours, the materials, and the structure of my pop up card it was time to execute the actual pop up pieces that would go inside the card. For the first time in years I had no computer print-out to follow, no detailed art work to look at and no well defined lines to cut into. I could have made more finished hand-drawn artwork than I had in my sketch of course, but by now I was running out of time and running out of patience for my usually meticulous process. Throwing caution to the wind, I took up a blank white sheet of paper and a pair of scissors, and began cutting the shapes of the house and the tree and the others I knew I needed, straight into the sheet.

It was the most fun I had executing a design in years. There was no tension of straying away from the designated shape. Only a free flow of cutting into the paper without fear and knowing that if anything went wrong, you could try again till you got it right. I never needed to do anything a second time. My blindly cut shapes probably had more character than most well drawn and planned things I had done before and they worked perfectly for what I had in mind.

I strongly recommend this sort of freehand cutting to all out there. If you think sketching is liberating, you have to try this one. It’s a whole new high, and you can achieve a strange paradoxical simplicity combined with complexity which you wouldn’t think would be possible. If you really loose yourself in the process, I guarantee you will be surprised with the level of accomplishment of what you produce.

The Results

On the final day of reckoning, I had made all my decisions and created the all important shapes that would form the heart of the pop up card. I had the right card stock for the job, and the correct blue for the sky. Along the way I rediscovered a small packet of Japanese hand-made origami paper I had picked up a couple of years ago. A pale green square from that pack formed the ‘grass’ of my landscape and the stage on which my words would be written. I used some bright red pieces to form a bold outer covering for the card, and a loop of orange craft paper formed a label and a simple device to hold the card shut.

It was finally done. I was very pleased with the final piece, which was just the right mix of well finished and hand made that I like to aim for. My well rehearsed but honest words were quickly scrawled into the card and it finally found it’s way into the hands of the lucky recipients. My friends were very pleased with the card and my efforts were vindicated. One of the couple specifically wanted to protect it from their kids. Any toy that makes parents want to compete with their kids for it is a perfect specimen in my book.

Thus my mission was accomplished, and I do hope more people would try out the process of creating and producing a finished piece of work like this without the interference of a computer. I found it to be very refreshing and rejuvenating. It made me find new solutions. It made me think in new ways. Or maybe they are old ways and I’m just happy because it made me feel like a child again. Then again, how can that ever be a bad thing?

My memories of reading as a child and of children’s books are a little strange.

The reason I mention those as two separate issues is precisely what I mean by “strange”. As a child, at the beginnings of the age at which “reading” started to make some sense, I discovered a large dusty tome stored away in a forgotten shelf when I was helping my Mother with some spring cleaning one afternoon.

My Mother was one of the least condescending parents you could ever wish for. Instead of snatching it away from me or discouraging me in anyway, she explained that this was one of the few books she had preserved from her college days. My Mother had studied zoology in college and this was a large college level textbook of biology with a focus on the animal kingdom. She then opened up the thick volume to somewhere in the middle and showed me why she had preserved this particular volume.

In the centre of the book were colour plates, but these were no ordinary colour plates. They were transparencies, but not ordinary transparencies. They were the closest thing to multimedia I have ever seen in a book because these transparencies were a virtual dissection. That might sound morbid, but I was never encouraged to be scared of anything and so as a child I saw the beauty of it. On the first sheet was an exquisite painting of a frog as seen from above, and as you flipped the plastic pages, you peeled back layers of the animal from skin, to blood vessels, to internal organs, to bone, and eventually back to a painting of the bottom view of the frog. It was beautiful, and I was forever hooked. While I did read comics and all the rest, I would often return to the large biology book with the beautiful frog in it, and I found beauty in every layer.

While I did plenty of more juvenile reading when I was very young, I never got into the typical children’s stories or bedtime fantasies at that age. Perhaps they always paled in comparison to the inner landscapes of a frog and the many other fascinating creatures in my biology book. Many years later, when I was a voracious reader in middle school, and I had already begun my journey into the mysteries of Agatha Christie and the vastness of Asimov, I came across a lone Enid Blyton book in the school library that caught my attention. I had never tried beyond a passing glance to get into any of her other works, and reading the Famous Five after Asimov seemed like a large leap backwards. Despite that, the stories of The Faraway Tree caught my imagination and I poured over them like a child anew. So taken was I by this simple but well imagined world that I later picked up an edition of the three Faraway Tree books in a single volume that I found at a dying bookshop on its last legs.

I still keep that one children’s book of my collection proudly on my bookshelf. It sits there in a position of equal importance with my book of bacteria and fungi, conifers and legumes, and one very beautiful frog.

My heartfelt gratitude to Emma over at Treehouse Jukebox for helping me remember, and for instigating this outpouring.

I was a bit surprised when I came across Good Business in the bargain bin of a local book shop. While I hadn’t read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s previous famous work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I had heard of it and read a basic synopsis at some point. I found his ideas to be quite intriguing. He seemed to be one of those thinkers trying to blur the boundaries between disciplines, which I like, so when I came across Good Business I picked it up.

That was a few months ago and I have been reading the book on and off as a break from other work. I finished it a few days ago and I must say it’s been a pleasant surprise. I’ve come across many books on the subject of business that were too trite or too heavy on the marketing blitz while being light on the content. I am happy to report that Good Business is not one of them.

Unlike many other works in the genre, Good Business is actually a good book, quite separate from what it is about. Rather than be a dry sequence of bullet points illustrated with cute explanatory graphics, this book takes itself seriously while also trying to tell a story and make a deeper point. It truly is a book you can read as a long narrative without worrying too much about the fact that you should be memorising some all-important sequence of numerically arranged facts that will save the world. I always find that this approach is easier to absorb than the pointillisation of knowledge that plagues most business literature.

That’s not to say this book has no “points” and categorisation, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a bit more subtle about it. The concept of Flow is an interesting one, and one which will be very familiar on a practical level to anyone who is in a creative field and anyone who is truly passionate about any activity they are involved in. It refers to that almost transcendental state we dip into when the world around seems to disappear and we are the most involved and focused on the task at hand. The author presents the idea that these Flow experiences are what human beings crave at a deep level, and that providing this experience is one of the pillars of “good business”.

The book goes on from there into the specifics of the state of flow, how it can be achieved, and to the role of the individual, the manager, and the organisation as a whole in encouraging these flow states in its constituent members, because the strongest outcomes result from this. If all this sounds like it could be boring, let me assure you that this is far from the truth. Good Business is not really bland theory but rather a bunch of interviews and anecdotes from people who the author considers to be exemplary or noteworthy business managers, about their experiences and thoughts on what makes and drives a good business. This interplay of anecdote and memoir with theory and philosophy works very well and truly engenders a human empathy with these concepts and experiences. The point is that even after a disjointed, casual reading (like I had), you really get this book.

I would highly recommend Good Business not only to business readers but also anyone interested in general philosophy. Because at the end of the day Good Business is a great study of the human condition, what makes us happy, what makes us do good creative work, and what makes us strong contributors to the greater social ecology. Business just happens to be humanity’s current obsession, and it’s a great framework within which to understand these issues.

Like all the greatest books, this one skates the boundaries of genre and subject matter. It presents a very humanistic view of the world of business, which is refreshing after the abundance of interpretations of The Art of War on the book shelves today being presented as business guides. “Business” is and is going to be an integral part of our affairs for a long time to come. If we are to be stuck with business as the major form of human endeavour in the near and far future, I would be much more comfortable if the paradigm suggested in Good Business were to act as the guiding light for the activities of those involved in business enterprises, rather than ancient war manuals and other undesirables.

The listing in the newspaper sounded innocent enough:

EYE YOGA…
If you wish to get rid of your spectacles, attending Sampoorna Eye Yoga Camp can do it the natural way. The camp will teach you eye exercises, Vedic in origin, that will help in relieving you of eye disorders. Register for a free lecture in South Mumbai. On January 17. (Tel: 98xxxxxxxx)

My vision is quite normal and I don’t wear spectacles, but my brother and father do, and so this was of interest. We decided to go, and I went along for moral support, and for remembering any useful details as the member of the clan officially interested in this sort of thing.

The “registration” over the phone was done and after plenty of research on the net about the directions given to the venue, we showed up. My hopes for true new knowledge were dashed as soon as I neared the class room in the old school where the lecture was being held. There was a man in “professional” attire, who seemed to be waiting to control the proceedings, and there were women at the door keeping a record of those who showed up. And then there were the attendees sitting on the undersized desks: concerned parents and curious consumers. Now when did those ever show up to serious events of information dissemination? Down the corridor, a classroom was filled with little children dressed in bright yellow and red clothing. They seemed to be gearing up to do whatever extra-curricular activity they were being forced into this evening for the “well roundedness” of their development. At that moment I had a feeling I would be better off with them, but it was too late for a reprieve. I stepped into the nest of buyers, picked up the badly printed brochure lying on the table, and took a seat.

Needless to say I didn’t find myself mentally enriched by the hour long “scientific” sales pitch that followed. Oh, I’m pretty sure this camp is serious, because it is based on well regarded sources and uses methods which I was, in fact, already familiar with. The Chakshushopanishad was mentioned and also the Bates Method which I was introduced to after picking up and old edition of Better Eyesight Without Glasses many years ago. Can’t say I internalised everything it had to say, but I learned and put into practice enough of the simple exercises to make sure my eyes aren’t completely fried by my copious staring at CRTs in the line of duty and curiosity. [BTW, the curious can also read an online edition of Better Eyesight Without Glasses in addition to the printed version]

This stuff works, if done with seriousness, but somehow that was not enough of a selling point for me. Not when the information is freely available for the dedicated seeker and I was being asked to fork out a good chunk of cash — more cash than I would spend on a completely extravagant book shopping spree. Yes, THAT much cash ! This might make me sound like a spoilt brat of the internet age, but I’ve always believed knowledge should be free, as far as possible. And I believed this even before the internet existed. The idealist in me likes to think that a perfectly sustainable world can be built around the free sharing of information and learning rather than on the suppression and censorship of it. That is what draws me to Open Source software and content, because here at last is an entire movement of people and organisations trying to live by that ideal. But the fact remains that most of the world is geared towards, suppression, repackaging and selling old lamps as new, so who am I to argue. All we can do is follow the dictum, caveat emptor while the lazier ones rush off for that new special offer on the complete set of multiplication tables from 1 to 10, available only today for a special low low price with a free bonus gift! A congratulate them on their newly acquired mathematical brilliance.

While I sat in this average looking school class room, trying very hard not to doze off, and formulating movie posters in my head for “My teacher was eaten by killer salesmen from outer space”, a came to the realisation that this really is how the average classroom looks. Smooth grey floor tiles, cream coloured walls that had been subjugated by the elements into a dull beige, slightly non-existent windows, various mismatched notice boards, and a general neutrality only fit for movie sets of forgotten mental wards of creepy hospitals where you assume the boring sameness is meant to keep the inmates calm and to prevent them from getting into fits. How is anyone supposed to learn and be inspired in this place?

To clarify, the reason this situation came as a revelation to me was not because I never spent any time in school, but because almost all of my schooling years were spent in one school: The Indian School, Muscat. It wasn’t drastically different, mind you. In fact the entire building (or complex of buildings) was painted grey. Most of the insides were painted grey, and the environment was generally neutral looking to the untrained eye. But the magic was in the details, like the fact that a quick peep through almost any window in the campus would reveal that the entire place lay at the bottom of a dry rocky valley that was surrounded by a range of towering peaks — I’m not talking Everest here but impressive enough. Then there was the fact that the school had grown organically over the decades from one small original building to an entire complex housing 10,000 students. The sheer variety of building styles, and more importantly the sudden juxtapositions where two sections met made it an adventurous place with ups and downs and what seemed like a million secret nooks which no student might have ever discovered. That place was inspiring. I can’t say any students there would agree to this during their studies there, and it certainly didn’t encourage me into higher levels of book-wormness, but I can safely state that in hind sight that school played a large part in moulding my mind into the convoluted maze with many hidden nooks that it turned out to be, rather than the plain and uniform set of dull beige compartments that most children are left with as they grow into adulthood. For that I am eternally grateful.

All good things must come to an end, and eventually the arresting oration on the defects of the eye came to a sort of close as the costs involved were tabled. The room broke into a cacophony of hyper parents worrying about how their children could possibly sacrifice 5 days of their precious brainwashing schooling to attend this camp and save their eyesight. People’s priorities never fail to surprise me. We made a quiet exit from the front, and walked out into a lovely dusk surrounded by ancient trees lining ancient streets, far from the ongoing discussions about cheque payments vs. cash. Like any other red-blooded human beings, all that talk of vitreous humours and celery muscles had made us all a little hungry, so we set out in search of sustenance. Easier said then done in an area where “restaurant and bar” seemed to be the norm and when you’re more of a street food person. A mini-quest later we came across a waft of chai which lead us to Cozy Snacks.

Cozy Snacks is a Mumbai eatery. That’s really the only way to describe it because I doubt this strange mix of slightly run-down restaurant that also sells chocolate bars, ice cream, aerated beverages, and supplies long-life milk to the locality, exists anywhere else. And then there is that unique menu of the Mumbai eatery, and I’m not talking about the physical object, we’ll come to that later. I’m talking about the food available: South Indian breakfast snacks, plus strange Indianised sandwich variations, plus local Maharashtrian dishes, plus North Indian savouries, plus fresh juices and and fruit-based milk shakes, equals standard Mumbai eatery. Our meal consisted of the ubiquitous South Indian wada-sambhar, some sort of a grilled potato sandwich and chai. And at this point I would like to return to the menu. Some other dishes on those plastic coated pages included the very Long John Silverish “Vegetable cutlace” (I’m assuming they meant cutlet) and “Fresh Lame Sota” (I’m not sure what to assume since “Fresh Lime Soda” also appeared as a separate item on the list). And that’s just another facet of a Mumbai eatery. If youre the kind of person who picks up on these things, even a casual reading of the menu can be an extremely entertaining experience. Of course, it goes without saying that the chai was nothing short of sinful.

The Crossword bookshop at Kemps Corner is a favourite browsing place, and we had, in fact, dropped in to kill some time before the great ocular oration of the day. Now, our thirst for knowledge not quite quenched by the sales pitch and the chai, we stepped back into the bookshop. Unlike earlier in the evening, this time we were greeted by floodlights and bored camera crews. We had noticed the buzz of activity earlier, and the posters, but it was still a bit surreal to see the entire magazine section cleared out o make room for a make-shift press room.

SUKETU MEHTA
announces the
Hutch-Crossword Book Award 2006
Shortlist

…shouted the placards and the flyers, and the literati, the news crews, and the journalists waited patiently well past the appointed time in hopes of wrapping this up and probably heading home. I doubt stuff like this is reported in a hurry or as “breaking news”. Someone needs to break something for that to happen. We went about our browsing business and eventually as I navigated the displaced magazine shelves haphazardly placed around the check-out I could hear the official event getting under way in the background. The usual state-of-the-nation stuff normally mouthed by management and then Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City I found out later) took over to get to what all the lights and cameras were here for. Before that of course, there needed to be the usual artistic stuff writers seem to be compelled to talk about when forced into a public corner. As I was browsing through the ever shrinking design and architecture section I could hear deep questions about why writers write. “We don’t do it for the money”, he said, and I thought aloud in utter indignation “Yes we do!”. Then he went on to say how writer’s actually write to (I quote as accurately as I can remember) “hear the distant echoes in kindred souls” or something like that. There was no applause during the momentary pause that followed. Flipping through novel compilations by unfamiliar authors I realised that I knew what he was trying to say but the problem with literature and any other communication that is too self aware is trying too hard to communicate. I’ve always found that the message is usually clearer when it is less costumed. The nuder the better.

We soon left behind the lights and headed for home picking up a bus across the street. As much as I would have loved to browse forever, eventually you have to realise that there are only so many hours during the day, and you must decide carefully how many of those hours will be spent in absorptive activities and how many in productive pursuits. I absorbed as much as I could on the way home as I always do when I am on the road. And the roads of Mumbai are so much richer.

Why do writers write, besides the money, in case you’re wondering? I don’t remember who came up with this answer, but I always found it to be the truest one: because writing is so much easier than not writing.

The strategy seems to be paying off, because what started out as some more fiddling with the proportional editing tool, and a little tinkering with the various options in the World settings, turned into this pretty decent image. No new raytracing and reflection/refraction tricks here. Just good, solid, plain-old Blender scanline. I wish all software documentation inspired such results.

ahem … I have spent the last day or so trying to figure out the texturing problem. I looked into the tris vs quads issue. The entire flat face of the wings was made of tris, but converting it to quads had no noticeable effect on the distorted wing and texture. While on the subject, I must mention that converting between tris and quads is a dream in Blender. For tris to quads it’s Alt-T in edit mode, and quads to tris is Ctrl-T in edit mode. Simple.

Having ruled out the tris as the cause of the un-sightly distortion, I needed to look elsewhere. Just as a trial I played around with the placement of the bones in the armature and that solved the problem. Because I had used an extruded curve, Blender had created the face of the wings automatically. This involved lots of tris in a sort of radial pattern, with vertices only on the edges of the wings. The problem was that the centre of rotation of the wing was not the same as the central point of the edge lines. So, the bone armature lay at a glancing angle to the lines, thus causing a sort of unequal twist of vertices when the wing was posed. I could not move the centre of rotation, so I moved the far end of the bone instead – making the armature lay almost perpendicular to the face lines. This seems to have done the trick.

That done, I finished texturing the wings, and then moved on to the body. The body was a little more complicated because it is a complex shape, and I had used cubic mapping on the UV texture. Cubic mapping seems like the logical choice when you see it laid out flat, but try fitting the various sides into a decent texture and it is a different story. I did finish the texture, but next time I should try one of the others methods, maybe cylindrical mapping. The antennae and the compound eyes were adorned with procedural textures, and you see before you the finished product rendered in Blender.

I am quite happy with the results. It is not technically perfect, and it has some holes in it (literally as well as metaphorically ), but it serves the purpose. It should work well in the scene I plan to create with it. That is what remains to be done. As always when there is something new to be seen, you will be the first to know … after me, that is.
:satisfied:

If I can’t get this to behave, I might be forced to remodel it, or explore other texturing options for that particular object. Maybe plain-Jane flat mapping might work… only one way to find out. The battle continues.
:plain:

I used the obj_io script to export the main objects to .OBJ files from Blender. These files were then opened in UVmapper Classic, a free program that unwraps meshes for UV texturing. There are various modes of unwrapping an object, such as plane, cube, sphere etc. I used a planar map for the wings and a cubic map for the moth’s body. The .OBJ files also need to be saved from within UVmapper to preserve the texture settings. These modified files were once again imported into Blender with the obj_io script. Now applying an image texture material to the objects, with the UV material setting on results in a proper recreation of the mesh coordinates as seen in the render.

Now it is a matter of taking these unwrapped texture files into an image manipulation program, and painting them appropriately using the mesh guides that were created by UVmapper. Simple really … except for all that hard work, but it should be worth it. Watch this space.

Using the references I had collected, I came up with a flat shape for the wings. It would have been easier to simply model them as a single flat plane, but once again I wished to make it a little more complex. So, I decided that I needed each half of the wing to have two sections that were attached to each other at the swivel point somewhere near the body. This segmented wing is found in many moths. I think it helps differentiates the model from the average butterfly.

After importing the wing shapes into Blender as a background picture, I set out to reproduce them with bezier curves. Next, I added a little extrusion in the Edit settings to give the wings a minimal thickness; nothing in the real world is infinitely thin like a plane in CG. This was converted to a mesh. The smaller piece of wing was give a slight slope, so that it would be at an angle to the main wing piece. Both of these pieces were duplicated, mirrored and joined with their twins to create a single wing mesh. I also thickened the central-front portion of the wing mesh, where it is attached to the insect body just above the head, to reflect the real thing.

Finally, the armature setup took some time to do. It’s nothing fancy at the moment, but there are 4 separate bones controlling the 4 pieces of wing. Due to the overlapping of pieces, assigning vertices to each bone was a slow process, but it was completed to a satisfactory level. The vertex assignment is not yet perfect because at some rotation angles, parts of the wing still intersect the insect body. That is an issue to be tackled as I work further on this model.

Next comes the UV texturing part, which is something totally new to me. I do, however, plan to make my life a little easier to begin with, by not using Blender’s built-in UV texturing utility. Will leave that for another project. Still, it remains to be seen how successful I am in texturing this to my satisfaction … and then there is the scene, the lighting etc. etc. …

Why did I get into this field again?
:confused:

Dupliverts in Blender, are a great way to model complex structures that involve the repetition of a basic unit in some regular manner. You select a mesh which is going o be the template for the placement of your copies, and you make it the parent of the object/mesh which needs to be repeated. Now press the Dupliverts button found in the object window (post v2.3) or the edit window (pre v2.3). This places a copy of the child object on every vertex of the parent object. So to create my antenna, I first created a simple mesh curve to be the parent. I then subdivided it many times to increase the number of vertices. Next, I created a stretched mesh plane which I subdivided and proportionally edited into a curved sail shape. This was the repeating shape. On applying the Dupliverts option I had a line of identical curved planes placed vertically along the parent curve. I needed a variation in the size of the filaments. Since dupliverts are logical copies of the same object, I had to convert the copies to real objects (shift-ctrl-A). Then with proportional editing I created a cascade of the curved planes gradually diminishing in size along the curve. This entire group of filaments was then duplicated and mirrored along the base curve to create the complete fern-like antenna shape.

I had already modelled 2 compound eyes before. Now the antenna was also duplicated and mirrored to create its symmetrical twin. To complete the body model, the half body was duplicated mirrored and joined to the original half. Remove doubles was used to create a clean joint between the two halves and to get rid of the ugly seam.

As you can see in the screenshot, the body of the moth is now complete. All it awaits are its wings. Coming soon to a blog near you …