'Thistledown'
This is also a 'still' taken from my animation of the same name. You'll notice the motion blur around the butterfly. This improves the animation tremendously, but does create artefacts on the still. The image/animation are derived from a photo of some flowers, which I found on a CD of licence-free images. It has a very profound depth of field effect, which I utilised for the distant birds and butterflies, etc. I thought it would also be interesting to combine some animated characters 'within' the photo. This was achieved using LightWave's alpha channel system. Notice how the thistledown on the right seems to lie 'within' the flowers.
The out-of-focus birds and small butterflies disappear 'behind' the flowers and foliage in the movie. This effect was achieved using alpha channel masks, which I had to construct in Modeler to match as near as possible, the shape of the flower petals, etc. Using alpha shadowing, it's also possible for the animated characters to 'cast shadows' on selected areas of the original photograph.
Notice the ladybird (ladybug for American viewers) on the leaf? This actually has tiny animated legs in the movie version. It wanders away from the viewer, into the sunshine and finally disappears over the far edge of the leaf. The butterfly was animated using LightWave 'Bones' and was integrated with the rest of the animation using a separate alpha channel. This image contains six different layers added one at a time. All the LightWave 'Objects' seen here are of my own design. I used Photogenics (a painting package) to create colour maps for the swallowtail. The animation took several weeks to choreograph and render. The final version (Amiga), complete with soundFX, can be downloaded from the Downloads Page.
