Fighting Jewel Stag Beetle

[Esben Oxholm]

Hi all. A ton of great entries so far!
Here's mine. A couple of fighting Jewel Stag Beetles.

Idea
I started by doing a quick brainstorm on unconventional ways to show off one of the new materials. During that I realised that the new anodised finishes would be awesome for the shield of jewel beetles. I decided to go with this idea as it also would allow me to do something different from the usual studio shots that I mostly do. From a resource of bug models I knew (link below), I picked a stag beetle as it would allow me to create an intersting fight between two of them as seen in nature.

Models
All models have been sourced from different places online. Some for free and some paid. See links below.
Beetles: http://zerokobo.web.fc2.com/
Stone + Trunk: https://www.textures.com/
Grass + Fern: https://megascans.se/

I brought the stock stag beetle model into Modo to split the mesh apart, create a duplicate and pose them in their fighting position.
The stone and trunk was brought into Modo as well to apply a displacement map before bringing them into KeyShot.
Grass and fern were imported directly and carefully positioned to create depth in the scene and act as a natural framing for the beetles.

Lighting
The general lighting (and reflections) in the scene are provided by a forrest HDRI: http://hdrmaps.com/cave-entry-in-the-forest
The pattern of sunlight and shadows are created using a sphere with an area light diffuse material together with a disc with an opacity map with the shape of a treetop.

KS7 Materials
I used the new niobium metal with an anodized finish for the main parts of the beetles. Graph attached.

Post processing
The raw rendering was post edited in Photoshop. I did my usual process of adjusting brightness/contrast, color grading and addition of flare and glow. Raw rendering is attached.


Thanks for taking a look.
Good luck to everyone!

[guest87362]

I think we have a winner here    this is stunning!

[DMerz III]

  great work Esben, going to be tough to compete with this, but I'm going to do my best!

[mattjgerard]

welp, there goes that!

Nice work sir, very nice!

[cjwidd]

seriously though, this is stellar +1

[Eric Summers]

Man, this looks incredible! That's an awesome use of the anodized metal!

[DriesV]

This gentleman says it all -->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BvyC_ODRM

No seriously, it is looking pretty awesome.

Dries

[cjwidd]

lmao^

[mattjgerard]

Seriously, Esben is like the Beeple of Keyshot.

For those of you that don't know, Beeple is a Cinema 4D artist that has done a "one a day" for the past 10 years, he does amazing animations and designs, and he shares all of his project files for free. VJ clips, full length music video animations, everything. Esben sharing screen shots of his setups and MatGraph setups is pretty dang cool. Props, good sir.

[NM-92]

Spectacular man !

[leo de brito]

OK, I knew that Esben would come up with something stunning, but this?!! Ooooww holly mother! It's so exciting to see works like this, it's so nice that it was made by a guy who actually shares his knowledge and it's amazing to see what's is possible to do with KeyShot. Congrats Esben! 

[Will Gibbons]

Nice work, bud!

[rfollett]

wow..

[Hossein Alfideh]

Damn!
Different and awesome Esben!Great work dude!

[Jaina]

Nice work！It's amazing