Can nature produce transparent materials? Yes it can! Glasswing butterfly (greta oto) is a marvelous piece of "engineering" and we challenge you to model and render it.
Hang on, butterflies and CAD, seriously? Indeed. It all started when Bettina Giemsa posted an article called Engineers & Butterflies over at PTC Planet community blog discussing transparency in the nature by exploring this wonderful insect.
One thing led to another and before we knew it we had a challenge going of which community (Planet PTC vs. GrabCAD) can create more models and renderings of the Glasswing.
The Challenge: model and render a Glasswing butterfly and post it to GrabCAD
Deadline: 15th of August, 2011
Prizes: This being a spur of the moment challenge we don’t have a big prizes lined up (any sponsors out there?) but we’ll send GrabCAD tshirt to the first person to model a Glasswing and to the person who creates the most natural looking rendering.
This one’s open to all CAD and rendering packages and the goal is to have fun, take time off from modeling joints, molds, fixtures etc.
I’ll update the post as the models become available so we can start working off each others efforts.
Update a few hours later
Amazing, we have the first to models in. Super work Gee, Manzil Kale, Francois De Vos, Igor Lins e Silva and Dave Cancilier. Oh man, this is growing fast. The cool thing - it’s all different CAD software. Can we collect them all?
Wikipedia: Glasswing butterfly
Google: pictures of Glasswing
Picture of a Glasswing by Liz West.
