Breathtaking 2D-Looking 3D Animation of a Butterfly on a Skeleton

Levi Magony, who specializes in 2D-looking 3D scenes, shared a heartbreakingly beautiful animation of a butterfly landing on a skeleton and making flowers bloom between its bones. Before sharing this scene on their socials, the artist stopped posting for about a year due to burnout, as they explained.

"I didn't need more time to rest. I didn't need more motivation. I just needed to give myself permission to make something imperfect. I put this pressure on myself, "my artwork has to be a masterpiece", and this is exactly the reason I can't start a project. Not starting a project saves me from failure and saves me from feeling not enough," Magony wrote on Instagram.

The artist created the animation in Blender. They built up the skeleton, the butterfly, and the flowers separately, and then set up the butterfly's movement using Geometry Nodes by controlling its path through Spline Parameter. The flower bloom effect was created with Geometry Nodes as well.

To create the subtle movement on the skeleton, Magony used the Displace modifier with a noise texture to create the bumps. An empty object was utilized as texture coordinates. The artist rotated the empty object every 8 frames to add variation to how the texture and the shape of the skeleton looked.

The painterly look everyone on social media is obsessing over requires a few simple steps. The artist explained that they 'slapped' a paint filter on the render in the compositor and animated the seed. After that, they typed '#frame/8' in the seed to change the appearance of the skeleton every 8 frames, just like in the previous step.

The artist said they might release a tutorial on their shading node setup sometime in the future. If you want to see more of Magony's work in the meantime, check out their Reddit.