Animate a Butterfly in Motion [Animal and Creature Animation - Unit09]

 Animate a Butterfly in Motion 

18/03/24

Introduction

This one was pretty interesting and different to all previous animations I’d explored on this module or ever. Animating such as small and delicate creature like a butterfly would no doubt have its challenges, however, at the same time the creature itself would be small on screen and would be airborne. Therefore, hopefully with the exploration of theory and study of reference I would be able to breakdown the motion into manageable chunks. I feel that the process of animating this would be most similar to the bird in flight as this will be an insect in flight. There should be similarities to the overlapping action on the wings and body as well as the flight paths, however, I imagine that the flight behavior will be vastly different.

Project Management

I started to get my processes and tasks in order on my Kanban board to organise my week and optimise my productivity. As I have with other tasks in this module, I’ve assigned initial days to the tasks to see how these tasks pan out over the week whilst also ensuring that there is enough time to produce quality outcomes in each task. There is an upcoming break to the module which I plan to use to improve the quality of my blog through Harvard Referencing all sources I’m using and ensure that each animation has been implemented into a scene. You can see all this reflected in the images below.

I was feeling really positive for this week as there was a clear breakdown of when stuff would happen that didn’t feel rushed. I was looking forward to putting together a really high quality submission from a practical and academic perspective. I’ve been trying to adopt a highly professional approach that focusses on quality. Undertaking this level of project management has really helped me organise my approach to working on the project amidst my teaching job and my freelance work! It’s been busy but good busy!

Reference and Research

As always research and reference is at the core of any animation and the best place to start. You can learn rules and approaches to give the illusion of life but real life and behaviour doesn’t always follow an exact formula, therefore studying actual behaviour will help inspire how things actually move. This helps me understand the small nuances to movements and behaviour and how this can be applied to underlying theory of movements.

The first video I came across was a slow motion video that wasn’t great to understand timing, however, is a great study of motion and posing of the wings (Butterfly, 2023). You can see how light and flexible the wings are through the way that they rotate. The front of the wings leads with the rear following behind slightly. You also see the full 180 degree rotation as the wings flap and meet each other with a little bit of overlapping action so that the tips of the wings slightly lag behind the parts loser to the body. You see a small amount of up and down body motion as the wings beat, however, this does seem to be relatively minimal in this shot.

I found this next video above interesting as it shows a butterfly taking off (butterfly eating and flying off, animation reference, 2017). I thought this possibly could be something that I incorporate into my shot as a stretch goal. I found it interesting how quickly the wings accelerate to maximum cadence to take off. You also see the minimal reaction of the plant that it was attached to which really shows how light these creatures are. 

This next video above breaks down the theory of how butterflies muscles work and how physics respond to allow them to fly (Exploring Invertebrates - How Do Butterflies Fly, 2016). It has some strong visuals that show a greater up and down motion in the body as these creatures flaps their way through the air. I also really like the erratic flight path that they take - they often change direction and fly in circular arced patterns. I want to use this behavior in my shot to add the erratic, randomness to the movement of the butterflies to match the behavior seen in this video. It also provides a strong insight into how the muscles are connected to its thorax and why the movement causes the body to raise and lower as it creates small vortexes of air. This helps give context to the things I learnt by observing the previous two videos.

The above video features an array of good shots to help me understand butterfly behavior (High Speed Video: Butterfly flying, 2013). The interesting thing about this capture is that it is using high speed capture and presents a variety of regular speed and slow motion shots of the butterfly in flight. This does focus a little more on butterflies taking off and landing on flowers. You see some smaller flowers here and little bit more wobble on the plants compared to the one I saw earlier. This shows a bit more impact on the plant life that could be exaggerated in animation. The video also shows a lot more of how the butterflies control their bodies and their flight paths as they move through the air. You can see the upward motion on the body as the butterflies control the air beneath them to create uplift. It’s also interesting to see some smaller range in motion of the wings as the butterfly approaches a hover before it lands.

This video above is incredibly useful at both providing key information as well as a strong range of high quality reference capture (Beautiful Butterfly Moments | BBC Earth, 2021). There are is a range of motion captured from take off to landing and various types of flight. It also shows other butterflies interacting with one another in the air. I find the flight paths really interesting in this video as you see really interesting erratic flight paths that have an element of randomness paired with intent. The butterflies tend to change direction as they are focusing around something or if something else in the environment has captured their attention. I want to include this in my animation by including a range of butterflies flying around an interesting environment. With some erratic flight paths and multiple butterflies I should be able to create an interesting and overlapped scene that is appealing to the eye. 

I also really like the in-depth study they explore that discusses how the butterflies move the air around them similar to how a fish moves through water. They highlight that the butterflies peel their wings to manipulate the air, which creates this beautifully overlapped motion. Because the butterflies flap so fast I think it will be key to represent and exaggerate this peeling motion through rotation so that it reads well to the eye through quick motions. They go on to highlight that the butterfly will flap their wings 25 times per second - this would be pretty difficult to do through animation as it means that there would be a flap on every frame which won’t read well when played back. Instead I would need to experiment with timing to gain a balance between realism and readability.

Next I collated the core theory of animating the butterfly from the theory blog (Williams, 2019). This has a strong breakdown of the frames to support my timing and shows that a flap is completed over 4 frames meaning that the butterfly will complete 6 flaps a second. This is less than discussed in the theory videos, however, makes sense to allow us to include enough readable poses across the timeline. This also breaks down the body poses using a strong line to show the up and down poses. This will be useful when creating the flap loop that I can then attach to a motion path to create the flight path.

Lastly, this supporting image (Williams, 2019) is useful at showing a potential flight path and how it incorporates the erratic nature of butterfly flight paths that I saw from my research. You can see the circular pattern which would likely occur around a point of interest for the creature - I will incorporate this into my work by mapping the motion paths around areas of interest in the environment. I also like the curved and arced nature of the curve in general - nothing is perfectly flowing and smooth. Instead the path has kinks throughout as the butterfly moves around the scene - something I should be able to easily incorporate using a CV curve tool, increasing the amount of control vertexes and making a wobbly curve. This should incorporate the theory seen here and explored in my study of reference.

Rig Acquisition

I started off with the rig provided on canvas by the tutors and experimented with this in Maya. It had a slightly odd setup where there wasn’t the ability to pose the wings and instead they were using physics driven deformers to bend the wings in response to motion. There were some controls over how soft you wanted the wings to feel too, however, I wasn’t keen on this lack of control with poses and having to rely on a system. I did however think that hopefully this might not be a huge issue as the butterfly would be flapping so fast it might not be noticeable and therefore not worth fussing over.

I started to create some initial tests to see how the rig performed under some simple animation. The video below shows one of the results that I got and I absolutely hated it! Even though the wings were currently in sync, the way the physics driven deformers were working made it look like they were offset from one another and this really didn’t match the elegance of the butterfly I’d been studying in my research. I tried tweaking the softness/stiffness of these deformers and the best results came when I made the wings stiffer, however, I then wasn’t able to get the overlapping action on the wings. The softer I made the wings the more like rubbery jelly they looked as they bounced around the centre rather than a full range of motion in the flap. I also experimented with tweaking the timing to slow the flaps down in the hope that the deformers might perform better, however, this didn’t yield good results either. I did get a slight improvement in the posing, however, the timing didn’t feel realistic.

Perhaps I wasn’t using the rig correctly, however, I had clicked on and experimented with every control I could. Perhaps the rig was slightly outdated and wasn’t responding as well as it used to in the 2024 version of Maya that I was using. Either way I quickly realised that I wasn’t going to achieve animation that I was happy with through the use of this rig. Tomorrow I would search for alternative solutions. The rig that I’d seen used in some of the tutorials looked to have a lot more manual control over the posing, particularly in the wings, therefore if I couldn’t find any free alternatives this would be an option to enable me to move on with the project.

19/03/24

I searched for a little bit of time to find an alternative rig for free, however, none of the options looked like they had as much control as the Gamino (2021) paid rig. The closest I could find was this rig by Truong (2017) shown below, however, there was no flexibility in the controls and when I imported it I got a lot of VRAY renderer nodes that just weren’t working nicely. I was going to render the animation in Arnold therefore the VRAY nodes wouldn’t be useful there.

Therefore, I decided to pay the £30 and purchase the Gamino (2021) butterfly rig. There was great control over all elements of the butterfly from the body to the leg to the antennae and most importantly the wings. There was control over the wing set in addition to control over the smaller rear wing - this is important as I’d seen a lot of over lapping action on the smaller wing that seems to act almost as a rudder whereas the larger front wing created a lot of the driving force. Therefore having control over both these should help to create more realistic animation. There was also a slider that would curl the wings so that I could create some overlapping action in the wing motion to also make it more engaging.

Firstly I wanted to pose the butterfly into its default flight position. The trickiest part here was understanding the leg posing in flight - I revisited my research but this was actually difficult to see when the butterfly was in motion. I decided to explore some static imagery to help understand how the butterfly poses its legs when in flight. I came across the below image by Reiff (2009) which shows the underside of the creature looking fairly streamline, however, it is difficult to pick out exactly how the legs are folded to achieve this. They must be somewhere though! This prompted me to search for any theory that I could find that would describe to me how the legs work. I managed to come across a page that studies the anatomy of butterflies in particular their legs! It discussed that, "When in flight, butterflies often hold their legs close to their bodies. This streamlined position reduces drag and allows them to fly more efficiently." (Butterfly FAQS, 2023) This was particularly useful as it was discussing where the legs would be placed and how they needed to be streamlined, which would help inform my poses when animating.

Whilst the theory here was useful the image made it difficult to see the legs again. I kept searching and I found the below image (Stirr, 2020). This is a lot clearer  as it shows close up how the butterfly holds its legs close to the body. In this case the legs aren’t super close so that they look stuck to the body but instead are curled up with the knee close to the body and then the legs hanging down from there. I felt this was close to the body of the rig I was going to use and therefore I could adopt this pose on my butterfly. I also liked the posing of the antennae - you can see how they are spread out but also curled towards the end. Something else I could use in my animation!

Animation

Now that I had enough research and understanding of how these creature are posed and how they move I was able to start animating the rig. Below shows my first pass of animation where I have primarily focussed on the core flap motion and the up and down motion in the body to match what I learned from my theory. The speed is pretty challenging to get the core poses working well whilst also looking natural and readable at a fast cadence. Overall I was happy with this as a base to be built upon. There was overlapping action on the wings as they tilted and flapped to move the air around. The body overlaps the wings and has a slight bob to it. I tried greater exaggeration on this, however, due to the fast nature of the loop this looked odd and I had to strike a balance in the amount the body raised.

To help with making the animation look more natural I actually used a 16 frame loop rather than a 4 frame loop. This meant I could create 4 slightly different flap poses to hopefully make this more random and less mechanical. This should add the elegance of the creature and help make the motions appear more natural. The body was looking pretty stiff at this point so I should be able to add some flexibility in the body next to make this look less rigid.

21/03/24

Now that I had the core motion I wanted to polish and make improvements to the overal animation using what I learnt from my research. I started with tweaks to wing rotation so that the front wings bend forward first with the rear ones lagging behind slightly. Next I delayed the  second/rear wing to create more overlapping action and create a tiny bit of separation for 1 frame between the two wings on each side. This would be subtle but would make the motion more realistic and closer to my reference. I experimented with making the body rotate more to add more flexibility, I tried offsetting the body controllers, as I would with a tail, however, this didn’t yield good results. This is likely because each flap is only 4 frames and there were many body controllers, therefore there wasn’t enough spacing to create overlap in the traditional way. To solve this I ensured that as the body went up the abdomen rotated down and vice versa to get this flexibility. I offset the entire abdomen controls by 1 frame which helped create flexibility in the creature. A lot of the motions needed to be quite subtle as if you exaggerated any of these, (…and believe me I tried!), then it would appear too erratic due to the small frame range.

Overall I felt these improvements made the overall animation look more natural despite the very fast nature of the action. I do feel that this attention to detail help sell the believability of hte motion and creates realistic flexibility in the motion that is true to real life. This was really challenging to achieve in such a small amount of frames, however, choosing to do a 16 frame loop of 4 flaps did help me vary the loop. I felt this was a good place to stop and move onto the scene animation as I didn’t think that any more time spent on the animation would make it any better especially when several of these were flying around a scene. I didn’t want to sink too much time into the core loop that then couldn’t be registered by the eye therefore this was a good place to move on.

Full Scene Animation

To start with I wanted to find an environment that would be appropriate for a shot with butterflies flying around. I wanted something nature focussed with some points of interest that I could make the butterflies fly around. I actually struggled quite a lot here and found a whole load of potentially suitable options but struggled getting these into Maya with the textures displaying. Previously I hadn’t had too much trouble but this time all the same techniques I was using to set the project and place the textures in the correct folder just weren’t working. I was primarily using FBX file types as these tend to work best with Maya, however, SketchFab would also use GLTF and GLB files. I did a little bit of research, however, I couldn’t find anything about getting these file formats into Maya and FBX just wasn’t working. However, I did come across a GLTF importer for Blender so I wondered if I could import these to Blender and then re-export an FBX but this time with embedded textures. I’d lost a lot of time so this seemed to be the best or only option at this point.

I came across this 3D model of ‘The Druid’s Temple’ (Arqueomodel3D, 2023) a location not too far from me that is on my list of places to visit! This is a photogrammetry scan that had a tone of detail in the nature that was present. I really loved the rock placements and the green vegetation that grew around them. I thought this would be perfect to find an in testing camera angle and have a few butterflies fly around points of interest. I also liked the fact that it was enclosed too, meaning that the horizon was hidden and choosing a camera angle would be easier!

I downloaded the GLTF format and then installed the GLTF importer into Blender to see whether it would easily import the asset with all the textures set up. Below shows the add on installation, I do really love this flexibility in Blender to easily install addons that tend to quickly and easily improve your pipeline. However, due to the issues I’d had with FBX’s I wasn’t 100% convinced this would definitely work…

…however, it did! Below you can see the environment that successfully imported into Blender with all textures applied. This should mean that exporting an FBX would be easy. I selected all the assets in the environment, went to export, selected FBX and looked for the embed textures option. However, I couldn’t find it at all. In Maya it is really clear and easy but I just couldn’t see it in Blender and was worried that it wasn’t an option. So I did a little bit of research to explore whether this was possible.

Luckily there were quite a few videos on the topic therefore I was confident that it would be simple enough once I knew what buttons to click. I used the below video (How To Embed Textures In FBX File Export - Blender 2.8, 2020) that identifies the processes involved to do this, which weren’t quite as straight forward as Maya. Firstly, you needed to pack the textures into the file itself so that they were inside the .blend source file. Then the path mode is changed from auto to copy which gives us the option to pack the textures into this FBX export which would have normally been greyed out. A little bit cumbersome but it works and I’ve learnt a little more about Blender now too!

Now the moment of truth - would it import into Maya with the Textures? YES! This was a pretty seamless process now that I understand what is happening and gives me a lot more options in future to aquire 3d assets and use the GLTF format and Blender to embed textures and transfer to Maya. You can see the environment successfully integrated into Maya in the image below. The image also shows the camera angle that I’ve decided to use on the right hand side of the viewport split. I have the composition set up to include the main central stone structure in the right hand third with the action on the butterflies planned to take place in the left 2 thirds.

The image also shows the first motion path that I’ve created to attach a butterfly too. I’ve created the path using the knowledge I learnt from the theory lectures and my observations of erratic flight paths from my study of research. There is a small green bush that I’ve created a wobbly loop around to hopefully make it look like the butterfly is interested in this element of the environment before flying off.

Below shows the first animation test I produced that includes 3 butterflies. I wasn’t sure how many to include, however, this felt like a nice balance and created some overlapping action. I varied the paths of the butterflies as well as the starting locations to make this appear fairly random. I also used the camera angle to place one in the background, one in the mid ground and one in the foreground. On the whole I was pretty happy with the placement of these as it allowed you to see the detail in the animation on the foreground as well as providing enough butterflies to make this appear like a natural area that butterflies would explore together. Almost always when I looked at my research there were more than one butterfly in an area so I though 3 butterflies was a good balance to this.

I initially started working on a 5 second shot at 120 frames, which felt good for the camera, however, when I attached the butterflies they felt a little too fast. You can see this in the shot below where they sort of zip around a little too unnaturally. I tried tweaking the paths a little, however, although this made some improvements I’d need to tweak the overall timing a little further afterwards. I liked the paths they took as it varied the height and pattern of movement and replicated that erratic nature. To pose the paths I used a relatively low amount of cortisol vertices to get the general shape and then rebuilt the path to give me more points that would allow me to create even more varied and erratic motion to the flight paths.

To develop this further I experimented with improving the areas I identified in my reflection on the first animation test. Firstly I changed the timing to a 7 second loop to give the butterflies more time to traverse the motion paths. This looked a lot better as the motion was still quick enough that it kept the erratic nature but not so quick that it looked unnatural. It now felt a lot more believable and therefore more realistic. I also tweaked the motion paths so that they didn’t all overlap in the same space relative to the camera. This created a more interesting overlapping action across the whole scene and made it more appealing to the eye as they crossed paths with each other individually rather than all at once.

Now that I was happy with the animation sequence I wanted to explore rendering. I used a very similar approach to the one I used on the Dinosaur through using an Arnold Physical sky and experimenting with the setting such as shadow colour, light angle and light intensity to create a day time scenario. Below is the first test that I produced. I was happy with the overall quality of the render as it felt like day time and the environment was responding to the light well. The shadows also had a really nice tone to them and weren’t too over bearing to the scene.  

Next I wanted to experiment with motion blur. In the last animation I experimented with depth of field so I was interested to see what effects I could get with motion blur. My biggest worry was that the intricacies on the animation I’d created would be completely lost as the motion blur smudges the motion of the butterfly. However, I was also hoping that if I could get the right amount of balance to this then it might improve the overall quality of motion as it smears the fast motion together. 

Below is the first test using default settings. I feel this is way too much and is smearing all the detail of this butterfly into an orange smudge. This is particularly noticeable when you zoom in. Another aspect I needed to balance here would be render times - If I tweak some settings, render and then don’t like the final outcome then I would lose a lot of time.

Below shows my experimentation with reduced motion blur. I feel this is a lot stronger and more aesthetically pleasing as butterfly retains a lot more of its detail with only a small amount of blurring. I felt this would be enough to blur the rapid motion together without completely losing the detail and motion of the flap loop. This blur should replicate the blur that our eyes see and actually make the motion more realistic and smooth. I was happy with the overall quality of this test render and was happy to experiment with rendering the full animation.

Final Outcome

Below shows the final outcome of this animation sequence. I was really happy with the overall visual quality of this sequence. It is a very calming and natural shot that reflects the elegance of this beautiful creature. The motion blur creates a beautifully soft motion to the flap that can sometimes feel very sharp and harsh when every frame of animation is rendered as a crisp frame. I feel this actually makes the motion of the wings more readable as this creature softly flutters through the air. The shadows are really nice and help ground the butterfly into the scene as they flap their way through the scene. This looks particularly good with the erratic motions as they move closer and further from the ground.

Conclusion

In conclusion I am really happy with this animation sequence. I have focused a lot more on the end outcome being a scene rather than the loop itself which helps convey elements of story telling further. The use of rendering with motion blur has created a high quality level of finish that helps smooth the fast erratic motion of the butterfly and its short flap cycle. I feel I have used research well to drive my understanding of how these creatures move and implemented what I have learnt into how I have animated this creature to bring it to life. I could develop the sequence further to include some foliage in the extreme close up range and have a butterfly land on this towards the end. This could incorporate the elements of study that I did for this, however, it would be relatively time consuming as I’d need to rig some foliage to respond to the action of landing and I’d need to look more closely at leg motion as the butterfly lands and stables itself. This could be a stretch goal for the further, however, I feel that I have explored an in-depth study of butterfly flight behavior and executed this to a high standard.

I feel I have achieved the learning outcomes, listed below, because I have :

• Understood butterfly flight principles by studying theory and researching butterfly behavior to pick out key elements for use within animation. I studied the pattern of wings as they flap to create air vortexes that they ride to give them lift and fly. I studied overlapping across the wings an body to create flexibility to make the butterfly look natural. I also studied flight paths and behaviour to understand how their erratic motion looks as they move through the air.
• I experimented with a range of different rigs to result in a rig that I felt was most appropriate and gave me the most manual control. This was challenging as many of hte rigs available lacked flexibility, however the David Gamino rig enabled me more manual control, which made me confident that it would have the dexterity to implement the theory I’d learnt throughout my research.
• I used the full range of rig controls to bring the theory I learnt to life, taking into consideration that these are small creatures that move rapidly. I implemented a range of varied overlapping action to create flexibility to the rig. I also used a 16 frame, 4 flap cycle to create more variation to the motion so that it looked more natural and less repetitive.
• Lastly I integrated this into a 3d scene and used motion paths to create erratic flight patterns inspired by my research. I used motion blur to soften the rapid motion and make it appear less sharp to the eye. This massively softened the motion and added a good degree of elegance to the motion that wouldn’t have been achievable without a rendered result.

Learning Objectives

• Understanding Butterfly Flight Principles: Uncover the unique principles that govern their graceful motion, from the rhythmic flapping of wings to the subtle maneuvers that define their flight.
• Introduction to the Truong Butterfly Rig: Familiarise yourself with the Truong Butterfly Rig, a freeware gem designed to bring the charm of butterflies to your animations. Learn where to find and download the rig, as well as how to navigate its features and controls for optimal animation results.
• Creating a Motion Cycle: Create a seamless motion cycle for butterfly animation. Explore techniques to capture the fluidity of wing movement and ensure a lifelike, continuous flutter that adds authenticity to your animated butterflies.
• Hands-on Tutorial – Butterfly Animation: A step-by-step tutorial that guides you through the process of animating a butterfly in motion. Learn how to create a motion cycle, seamlessly attach it to a motion path, and bring your butterfly to life in a dynamic scene complete with sets and props.

Project Management Update

Lastly I updated my project management documentation to take stock of where I was at as a whole. All butterfly tasks were completed to a good standard and to a point I was happy to conclude this task. Tasks were completed on time meaning that as a whole I feel on track with the overall progress I’m making through this module. My next steps are to review the quality of my blog and accurately Harvard Reference all the sources that I’ve been using to support my animation development. After this I plan to use the techniques I learnt to integrate 3d environments to Maya through using the GLTF importer in Blender and transferring to Maya through embedding the textures into a FBX. This will prepare my blog for submission and present my animations in the best light with elements of performance and storytelling that contextualise the animations into an environment.

27/03/24

Since writing this post I finally received clarification on the assignment brief aspect of the blog. I need to submit one performance sequence that has an element of storytelling with supporting materials and a reflective blog post. This probably means I've gone completely over kill with the depth of analysis and presentation of these tasks, however, I think it shows my learning and journey clearly. I have kind of done this already with the horse rearing, however, I want to create a fully planned animation sequence from scratch for a quadruped. I think I want to do a dog so that I can use my dog Yoshi as reference. I've shuffled my tasks around on my Trello board to move everything into the back log that isn't crucial to my submission. I am going to prioritise Harvard referencing my blog for this module over the next couple of days and then start and prioritise the animation sequence. I am hoping that I can finish most of this during the break and then return to finishing the tasks in the way I have been. This feels like a lot of work but I am hoping it will be worth it!

Reference List

1. Arqueomodel3D (2023) The Druid’s Temple | Yorkshire UK, Feb 15th [Sketchfab]. Available at https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-druids-temple-yorkshire-uk-d02a46b51f2343d8ad951a3ede408aaa [Accessed 29 March 2024].
2. Beautiful Butterfly Moments | BBC Earth (2021) YouTube video, added by BBC Earth [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQ06YuP-Vw [Accessed 29 March 2024].
3. Butterfly (2023) YouTube video, added by Animation references [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJyI7CWy4vE [Accessed 29 March 2024].
4. butterfly eating and flying off, animation reference (2017) YouTube video, added by Anim Ref [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz6Am-WeKxY [Accessed 29 March 2024].
5. Butterfly FAQS (2023) Exploring the Beauty of Butterfly Legs: Anatomy, Function, and Adaptation. Available at: https://butterflyfaqs.com/beauty-of-butterfly-legs/ [Accessed 29 March 2024].
6. Exploring Invertebrates - How Do Butterflies Fly (2016) YouTube video, added by The Nature Realm [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk3owIFJaX4 [Accessed 29 March 2024].
7. Gamino, D. (2021) Butterfly 3D Model, September 18th [Free3D]. Available at https://free3d.com/3d-model/butterfly-5647.html [Accessed 29 March 2024].
8. High Speed Video: Butterfly flying (2013) YouTube video, added by Nikin0804 [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCH98HLjass [Accessed 29 March 2024].
9. How To Embed Textures In FBX File Export - Blender 2.8 (2020) YouTube video, added by Levonotion Studios [Online]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8HHDQp_plw [Accessed 29 March 2024].
10. Reiff, R. (2009) The Fearless Giant [Online]. Available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/23616309@N05/3819346056/in/photolist-6Pv9w5 [Accessed 29 March 2024].
11. Stirr, T. (2020) Photographing Butterflies In-Flight [Online]. Available at https://smallsensorphotography.com/photographing-butterflies-in-flight [Accessed 29 March 2024].
12. Truong, C. (2017) Boxy Butterfly Maya Rig, July 20th [Turbosquid]. Available at https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-boxy-butterfly-rig-model-1182406 [Accessed 29 March 2024].
13. Williams, A. (2019) ‘Butterfly Animation Tutorial at Vimeo, Escape Studios Animation Blog, 17th April [Blog]. Available at https://escapestudiosanimation.blogspot.com/2019/04/butterfly-animation-tutorial-at-vimeo.html [Accessed 29 March 2024].