Swarm

People say they came from space, or a government experiment. Nobody knows.

The giant insects build hives that tower ten, fifteen meters into the sky with tunnels deep underground. They lap up rivers and lakes. They drain the water table, soak the air dry.

The bugs are on every continent now. They are desiccating our world.

We tried everything. Their nests close out poisons. Explosives scatter them to form new hives.

I will find their Achilles’ heel. I know there has to be one.

I set my toolbox down, take a deep breath, exhale. Then I get to work.

The nests are all isosurfaces, spheres with noise applied, with some normal perturbation for fine textures. The ground is a height field.

The ground is generated from a 145Mb tga image, tiled 2550 times all the way to the horizon. At this scale, there's no way to see the seams. :-) I really should have added some hills, and I wish I had some fine cracks in the surface (perhaps via normals), but I got sick of messing with it.

I cheated on the lighting. :-) I wanted more of the nests to be highlighted, but I still wanted the shadows to match the light source visible in the scene, so I put most of the nests in their own light group with the light source offset a touch. I turned off the area_light on these sources, though I don't think it helped performance much.

Finally, the lens flare was done in The Gimp. Sorry if this bothers you. Chris Colefax's lens flare macro wasn't quite up to the task.