CG Insects in Flight

Ramtin Ahmadi realised this impressive insect project in his spare time over the course of 3 to 4 months. The breakdown video shows how it was created.
A cartoon praying mantis holding a green beetle in its grasp, with a soft glowing background.

Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 13, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

The artist worked with ZBrush, Maya, Arnold and Nuke. His hardware setup was a Xeon E5-2687 processor at 3.10 GHz, 64 GB of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro 6000 card. Rendering the 30-second sequence took around 12 days. 

Insects from Ramteen on Vimeo.

Here is the making-of:

Insects – Making of from Ramteen on Vimeo.

Further work by Ramtin Ahmadi, who works in Dubai, can be found here.