Welcome to the Blue Morpho to Monarch tutorial¶
In the next 45 minutes you will take the iridescent blue of a Blue Morpho
butterfly and transfer it onto a Monarch 3D model, bake a PBR normal map,
animate the wing flap, and ship a borderless animated .esk skin that the
Elysium UI framework loads as a Python app.
The finished skin is the official Elysium logo: a hybrid Monarch wearing the Blue Morpho's color, pattern, and iridescence, gently flying down the screen with wings flapping, unfurling the Elysium wordmark behind it.
What you will build¶
By the end of chapter 8 you will have produced:
- A
.eskskin bundle atexamples/butterfly/butterfly.esk/. - A baked albedo texture at
examples/butterfly/butterfly.esk/textures/butterfly_albedo.png. - A baked normal map at
examples/butterfly/butterfly.esk/textures/butterfly_normal.png. - A short wing flap animation, keyed at frames 1, 12, and 24.
- A borderless app window shaped like the butterfly's silhouette.
The Elysium UI framework's
Butterfly Banner tutorial
takes the .esk you produce here and wires it into a running Python app
that flies the butterfly down a real desktop.
Prerequisites¶
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Elysium Designer installed | See Installation. The Designer ships as a .app on macOS, a .exe on Windows, or an AppImage on Linux. |
| 4 GB free disk | Source assets are about 2 GB. Bakes add another 500 MB. |
| About 45 minutes | Eight chapters; each is a single screen of work. |
You do not need any 3D modeling experience. You do not need to write Python during this tutorial; the framework Butterfly Banner tutorial covers the Python side later.
The assets you will use¶
The Designer's example folder ships with everything you need.
| Asset | Path | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Monarch 3D model | examples/butterfly/_3ds/butterfly.3ds |
The geometry you will texture. |
| Blue Morpho photo | examples/butterfly/iridescentwinged_butterfly.png |
The pattern and color reference. |
| Reference texture | examples/butterfly/_3ds/texture.bmp |
The original Monarch albedo. We replace this with the bake. |
All three are open-source or photographer-licensed for use with the Designer.
The eight chapters¶
| # | Chapter | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Open the Designer | 3 minutes |
| 2 | Import the Monarch model | 5 minutes |
| 3 | Import the Blue Morpho reference image | 4 minutes |
| 4 | Set up landmarks | 8 minutes |
| 5 | Run the Polar + Bake + Normal Map pipeline | 5 minutes |
| 6 | Compare the BBox-Warp pipeline | 5 minutes |
| 7 | Render and export | 5 minutes |
| 8 | Animate the wing flap and ship | 10 minutes |
Each chapter ends with a checkpoint screenshot so you can verify you are on track before moving on.
Conventions¶
Throughout the tutorial, menu paths are written with > separators, like
Mesh > Transfer Texture > Polar + Bake + Normal Map (PBR). Keyboard
shortcuts appear in code formatting: Cmd+S on macOS, Ctrl+S on Windows
and Linux. When a step needs you to click in the canvas, the exact pixel
target is named (e.g. "click the upper-left wing tip on the photo, then the
matching tip on the model").
When you see a starred entry in a menu, that is a curated recommended
pipeline. The two starred Mesh menu entries (Polar + Bake + Normal Map (PBR)
and BBox-Warp then Landmark Gaps + Bake + Normal Map) are the workflows
this tutorial covers.
Ready¶
Head to chapter 1 when you are ready.