When I was in grade school, I drew this picture to give to my mom for Mother’s Day:

She hung it up in her classroom, and she said the kids in her classes always liked it and asked her about it. This year, for Christmas, I decided to do a remake of this picture as a CGI render and get it printed and framed for her. This project put my skills to the test in a number of ways.

For the texturing of the worm, I finally learned how to do UV mapping in Blender. It’s the most common method for drawing a 2D image onto a 3D object, but somehow I just didn’t have the need for it until this project.

I had a fun time making the nest, and it allowed me to learn a little more about Blender’s Particle System feature. All I had to do was model and texture six or seven twigs, then create an invisible ‘frame’ of the nest that would auto-generate hundreds of copies of the twigs at random points around its surface. Thankfully, Blender allowed me to set some random rotation for each twig (to make it look organic), while still having them generally oriented around a circle (as birds’ nests are in real life).

The feathers were a bit of a nightmare and took up about half the time for the whole project. I found it very difficult to control how they reflected light (where the light and dark spots would appear), but after a lot of fiddling I’m satisfied with the result.

My mom loved the picture, and that’s all that really mattered.