The Small Hive Beetle, Aethina tumida, is an invasive and damaging pest of honey bee colonies. The small hive beetle is a menace in many states and is widespread in the southeastern region of the United States
The goal of this publication is to familiarize Oregon beekeepers with this invasive beetle, as early detection, reporting, and monitoring of small hive beetle may help mitigate its establishment in this region.
6 comments
hello i am a beekeeper, how can i download this model to print it, its for educational purpose.
ndrakey, I noticed you mentioned sculpting and splitting body parts. This is pure vertex modeling, and in one contiguous object.
I modeled the Sap Beetle first. I used orthographic image planes from the top, side, and bottom to place vertices in 3D space. It's pretty low-poly and symmetrical, but I used subdivision surfaces and edge creasing to enhance details. After creating the first leg I duplicated it and simply modified it to match the reference photos of the other legs. The geometry took about 6 hours.
Texture unwrapping took around 4 hours, but the actual texture painting took only 2. I erased the image of the legs projected on the underside of the beetle from the texture maps.
I actually went a beyond the scope of Sketchfab and gave the Sap beetle an armature skeleton so that I could pose it for image renderings for a publication.
The Hive beetle used a copy of the geometry from the Sap beetle. I modified it to match the second set of reference photos. This way, all of the edge creasing and UV map edges were already in place. As a result, the hive beetle took a total of about 6-8 hours rather than the 12 hours of the sap beetle.
May I ask how much time you spent for each of the beetles?
When modelling insects I personally tend to split all the different bodyparts and group them which takes ages sometimes.
Also getting the legs in position seems to be difficult when sculpting. Would be interested what works best for you ?
Hi ndrakey. No, these insects are so small that photographing them is very difficult. The narrow depth-of-field when taking microscopy photographs means that you have to stack focus of hundreds of photographs and that takes time.
In this case it was faster to model by hand off of orthographic top, side, and bottom reference photographs from Chris Hedstrom ( chedstrom.tumblr.com/ ). These source images then lent themselves to the textures, too.
is this photogrammetry ? The topology looks so nice and clean.