Engineering and Glasswing Butterflies

August 23rd, 2011 | By Josh Mings

How could engineering and butterflies go together? So many beautiful ways really. You may remember the Glasswing butterfly challenge we put together with the PlanetPTC Community a few weeks ago. Here are the results.

Glasswing Butterfly. Image Source: Wikipedia

This was a fun, spur of the moment competition between the two communities. A simple challenge inspired by a great article on Glasswings and Engineering by Bettina Giemsa, who ended up organizing the challenge on the PlanetPTC side. We’ve meet some people along the way and definitely plan to have more challenges like this in the future.

Glasswing butterflies

You really must read more about this amazing creature whose binomial name is Greta Oto. The users on GrabCAD and PlanetPTC certainly had some great inspiration. A few things to note about the challenge.

• GrabCAD users stayed with the glasswing butterfly theme.
• PlanetPTC Community users experimented with an overall butterfly theme.
• The number of submissions and submitting individuals was about equal.
• PlanetPTC users used PTC products. GrabCAD users used their choice of CAD products.

Entries on both side were just incredible with many fine examples that matched the beauty you would see in a flower garden of Central America. With all the entries received, we have selected four – two from the GrabCAD users and two from the PlanetTC Users. Here are our favorites:

GrabCAD Users

A highly detailed image of a Glasswing butterfly modeled and rendered in KeyCreator by Dave Cancilier

This Glasswing butterfly model done in SolidWorks and rendered in Houdini was created by David Thomas

PlanetPTC Users

This beauty was created in Creo Parametric 1.0 and rendered in KeyShot by Tim McLellan

PlanetPTC Community member Anthony Mahynski created this butterfly in Creo Elements/Pro 5.0

To view all submissions for each community, just visit the PlanetPTC photoalbum and the GrabCAD Library.

 

Which one is YOUR favorite?

Do you have a favorite? We’d love to hear which ones you like or what other ideas you might have for a challenge between communities. Thanks again to the PlanetPTC community and to Bettina Giemsa and Dan Marotta for organizing things on their side! Until next time!