Behind the Scenes: Krishnabai Shiva Temple

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Hello, my identify is Bhargav Kubal, and I’m a 3D artist from Vengurla, India. I’m self-learned and have https://sunsetcatch.com/ labored for Modelry, an outsourcing firm. I’ve developed a robust curiosity in prop creation and aspire to work as a prop artist.

INSPIRATION

Inspiration drives work, when a topic holds private which means and significance, it turns into satisfying to work on. In the event you’ve ever heard somebody say, “It was a labor of affection,” that is what it means.

For this undertaking, I wished to be taught and acquire expertise with modular belongings whereas additionally making a portfolio piece. I like selecting topics that imply one thing to me, issues that I do know by firsthand expertise. Years in the past, I visited the Krishnabai Shiva Temple in Mahabaleshwar and located its distinctive look excellent for this undertaking.

References play a significant function in any undertaking. Gathering good references from completely different angles ensures correct modeling and saves you from rework afterward. Pureref is a useful software program for gathering references and creating temper/reference boards. I made certain to gather quite a few references for the varied areas of the temple via YouTube movies and Google Photos.

BLOCK-OUT

Blockout is essential for establishing the proportions of an asset. A well-executed blockout saves you from making corrections later within the modeling stage. When creating modular belongings, it is advisable to stay with widths which can be multiples of two or 3, making them simpler to control in sport engines.

For this undertaking, I made a decision to make use of 3m widths for roofs, partitions, flooring, arches, and ceilings, and 1.5m for nook items of partitions and roofs, in addition to for belongings within the central space like stairs and Kund stones.

MODELING

Earlier than modeling belongings, significantly in a big undertaking, it is necessary to determine which of them may have distinctive texture units and which of them will use trimsheets. The pillars, arches, cow statue, wall stones, foremost deity, and Kund stones had distinctive textures. The hanging deities additionally had high-poly fashions created. Nevertheless, to maintain the feel price range moderately low, I selected to decimate the sculptures and use a trim materials on them.

When it comes to workflow, it is a good suggestion to begin with bigger items of the undertaking, as you spend extra time on what will probably be seen extra. Then, you possibly can transfer on to the smaller, extra attention-grabbing props. Moreover, holding modular items giant, helps you save time when assembling the belongings.

RETOPOLOGY

Retopology performs an necessary function in asset creation. The retopologized mesh shouldn’t have shading artifacts; in any other case, when the textures are mip-mapped, the artifacts turn out to be seen. Nevertheless, because of the giant variety of meshes requiring retopology and strict time constraints for the undertaking, I could not manually retopologize this time.

As an alternative, I had to make use of Simplygon, a fast LOD creation software, for the low-poly meshes. You merely set the discount quantity, and it reduces the mesh accordingly. The decreased mesh did have some artifacts as a consequence of excessive discount. To deal with this, I used the weighted normals modifier to take away as many shading artifacts as potential and obtain flatter shading.

UV

Grouping the belongings into completely different texture units was an intuitive and iterative course of, contemplating elements reminiscent of texture price range, the connection between the belongings, and their sizes (as measurement corresponds to UV area).

Though web sites and YouTube movies usually suggest an edge padding of 32 pixels for Uvs with a 4k texture, in actuality, it wastes an excessive amount of area.

I not too long ago found that 16 pixels at 4k is the popular follow. This video explains it effectively:

TEXTURING

Substance Painter is a robust software that makes texturing a hassle-free course of. Having high-resolution reference pictures at this stage is extraordinarily useful. Jason Ord’s hand drill tutorial on ArtStation Studying drastically aided my understanding of Substance Painter. I extremely suggest checking it out: “Substance Painter: Pushing Your Texturing Further.”

As soon as all of the belongings are textured, it’s essential to color-match them. Adjusting saturation and values ensures that each one the belongings look cohesive, and the eye does not focus solely on a single asset.

The ceiling featured a worn-down sculpture, and I used Substance Sampler to extract the peak element from it. I then added this element to the trimsheet in Substance Painter.

POST-PRODUCTION

I textured the asset in ACES, so I needed to set up ACES in Blender; in any other case, the colours regarded off. Magic Mark has article on how to do that, and so they have narrowed down the colour profiles to make it extra manageable when utilizing it in Blender.

When utilizing ACES in Blender, be sure that any imported belongings have been assigned the proper coloration profiles. Typically, this discipline might be empty, which may trigger Blender to crash in lookdev mode.

Put up-production is a vital step in giving your renders that last 15% polish. DaVinci Resolve is a extremely nice program for video modifying. It is free, with only some locked options that I did not discover to be an issue. You’ll be able to export in 4k, the playback is clean, and the nodes are actually intuitive.