Mosquito in amber

3D Model

Messing around with refractive materials!

The Mosquito scan (415k tris) is from Geoffrey Marchal.

Modeling:

• The scan was first remeshed with mmgs and baked to a lighter version (11k tris).
• The amber fragment was roughly sculpted in blender (“I have no clue what I’m doing” style), keeping the main face flat (clay strips + flatten brushes).
• The small fragments inside the amber were done by splitting all the main fragment edges and applying the “shrink/fatten” tool, followed by a random Displace modifier. Exterior fragments were then removed with a boolean modifier.

Material:

The important parts are the roughness and normal maps, which are a mix of PBR textures (rougher edges, smoother main face), while the refractivity is just a product of tweaking Sketchfab settings: opacity set to refractive and using the object’s roughness.