Animation of insects

[ejb190]

I am so far out of my expertise with this question, but I figured someone here would know where to start.

There is an animated GIF of an Asian Longhorned Beetle. I think someone from the USDA made it, but I can't track down who.

There are a lot of other invasive species I would love to see animated in a similar fashion for educational use, but I have no idea where to start, what applications would be needed, or how hard this would be. Any ideas where to start? There's a fair amount of video out there of several invasives like spotted lanternfly that could be used for reference.

And yes, I have handled these critters and they are very nearly this charismatic!

 

[User #07242024]

Are you looking for the creator or the GIF?

 

[ejb190]

Are you looking for the creator or the GIF?

Obviously, I have the GIF! The end goal is to figure out how to make more GIFs like this for other invasive species.

 

[wonderings]

Might be worth giving AI a try for this. AI can develop short video clips. With enough description of exactly what you are looking for you might be able to do this pretty simply. This is one I quickly did with Adobe Firefly. Prompt used was "a realiastic lady bug isolated with a white background, turning slowly this way and that"

 

[ejb190]

Might be worth giving AI a try for this. AI can develop short video clips. With enough description of exactly what you are looking for you might be able to do this pretty simply. This is one I quickly did with Adobe Firefly. Prompt used was "a realiastic lady bug isolated with a white background, turning slowly this way and that"

Wow. That is impressive. And as an entomologist, it's pretty darn accurate in the details!
This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. Now I have hope that I might be able to complete this project on my own for a reasonable cost!

 

[StellarVixen]

Wow. That is impressive. And as an entomologist, it's pretty darn accurate in the details!
This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. Now I have hope that I might be able to complete this project on my own for a reasonable cost!

You, as an entomologist, didn't notice that a ladybug has both antennas on the same side of the head? Don't you think they should be on the left and right side of the head?

 

[Herbert123]

You have two options:
[1] animate with a 3d model (this is what your posted example is made with
[2] use generative AI and hope for the best

[1] means either (a) modeling and rigging your own insect models or (b) acquire these either for free or for a fee from various 3d model repositories. Then animate these.

(a) is time-consuming and requires a lot of artistic and 3d modeling/rigging knowledge and experience. It will take someone with zero experience a year or so to achieve acceptable results such as in your example. An alternative for modeling would be to scan actual insects. But for smaller species it means quite specialist equipment or at the very least magnification.

(b) is quite doable, but you will still often need to rig the models, since rigging (virtual bones to animate with) is not always part of a 3d model (not even commercial ones).

Examples of free models are:

Blend Swap | Search: insect

Create and Share Blender Assets

www.blendswap.com

The quality will differ, depending.

Other resources are academic endeavours which are building repositories of 3d scanned animals.

3D Models — Digital Life

Digital Life has a growing library of the most accurate and high quality digital 3D models of living animals in the world. These 3D models are freely available for scientific and educational use.

digitallife3d.org

Most academic sources use Blender (which happens to be entirely free and open source!)

I loaded the jumping spider in Blender:

But this would still need to be rigged before it can be properly animated. It's not too difficult with autoriggers, though.

Still takes time and learning. Then animate according to reference materials, and render to an animation.

[2] is, as @wonderings demonstrated, also an option. The problem is always accuracy. Details almost always go wrong, and it is generally quite plain that it was AI generated.

Firefly isn't very good and pricey. A better option is to download the free Krita, and the free generative AI plugin, and then install a few loras that are specific to insect generation. The advantage is better results, and the processing for the images is done locally on your computer.

Civitai | Share your models

civitai.com

It still will be difficult to get academically and anatomically completely correct insects at times. And Krita cannot do animation, so you will have to learn how to create these AI animations locally by installing various third party tools. And you will need a good graphics card (CUDA on PC) or a good high-end Mac model for best render times.

Or rely on online AI solutions. Which are difficult to control for these specific usage cases.[/B][/B]

 

[wonderings]

You, as an entomologist, didn't notice that a ladybug has both antennas on the same side of the head? Don't you think they should be on the left and right side of the head?

I am certainly not, but the more detail you feed into it the better it is. I asked ChatGPT to make a prompt for a realistic lady bug video. This is the prompt it provided me:

A hyper-realistic, side-view video of a seven-spotted ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata) on a clean, pure white background. The ladybug is clearly shown in profile, revealing its smooth, dome-shaped, glossy red body, about 7–10mm long and 5–8mm tall. Its elytra (hardened wing covers) are bright red with seven sharply defined black spots—three on each wing cover and one centered at the rear where the two meet. The black pronotum is trapezoidal and shield-like, with two large white markings near the top corners. The small black head is partially visible, with short, elbowed antennae and round black compound eyes. Six jointed black legs support the body, clearly visible from the side.

The ladybug moves slowly and naturally: it walks a short distance (just a few steps), occasionally pausing, raising a front leg, twitching an antenna, or adjusting its head. Its motion is deliberate and insect-like—slow, precise, and slightly uneven. At one point, the elytra shift slightly, hinting at the transparent flight wings beneath, but they do not open fully. The lighting is soft and even, eliminating shadows, and the background remains a smooth, uninterrupted white.


The video is created in around 10 seconds was this:

I cannot speak to the accuracy of any of this as it is all generated by AI. You can obviously make the prompts yourself with the info you want to see.

 

[Herbert123]

@wonderings Check the legs: it's 'magical' (read: nothing looks right). And the animation is horrible: legs disappearing and morphing into other legs.

Compare a real photo, and it becomes obvious how bad the AI version actually is. AI slop.

 

[Herbert123]

The real issue is that people will still believe that the AI generated one is genuine, because most haven't REALLY looked at how an actual ladybug looks like.

Anyone will scream "AI!" when they see a picture of a human with 7 fingers. No-one will bat an eye about those ridiculously wrong Ladybug legs because -- well, most have no clue what they are supposed to look like.

AI makes fools out of everyone. It merely points out the lack of knowledge in most people.

 

[wonderings]

@wonderings Check the legs: it's 'magical' (read: nothing looks right). And the animation is horrible: legs disappearing and morphing into other legs.

Compare a real photo, and it becomes obvious how bad the AI version actually is. AI slop.

As I said I am not even a lay person when it comes to bugs of any variety. It comes down to the user working with AI. So you can correct and make changes with AI. The videos I made were with Adobe Firefly, not sure how accurate that is a the moment and what is has for references, I believe it only has access to the adobe stock library and even then only by artists and photographers who allow it. The images below are created by ChatGPT, as the expert or at least knowledgable one how do these compare out of curiosity?

 

[Herbert123]

As you can tell, ChatGPT's version is also utterly wrong.

 

[ejb190]

You, as an entomologist, didn't notice that a ladybug has both antennas on the same side of the head? Don't you think they should be on the left and right side of the head?

Yah, I noticed. But there's a lot it got right. Like the number of tarsi.

I teach plant diagnostics occasionally and the number one thing I teach to my students is don't jump to a conclusion - you will miss something. Ya'll failed my class! Nobody asked what the end use was and how good they needed to be! The answer is I am working on a iPad based gaming kiosk for large events and wanted a moving image for the splash screen.

The game is good, but doesn't attract a lot of attention until an attendant encourages someone to play it. So actually a little work with the AI model would probably give me adequate results. I also have quite a bit of reference video that we could use to feed in.

I'm more of a database person - haven't even used Photoshop in 20 years! Now it looks like I just need to spend the time to figure out how to do it. u/wonderings and u/Herbert123, I appreciate the guidance!