Behind the Scenes: Krishnabai Shiva Temple

INTRODUCTION

Hello, my identify is Bhargav Kubal, and I’m a 3D artist from Vengurla, India. I’m self-learned and have 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 that 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 mission, I needed to be taught and acquire expertise with modular property 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 good for this mission.

References play a significant position in any mission. Gathering good references from totally different angles ensures correct modeling and saves you from rework in a while. Pureref is a useful software program for gathering references and creating temper/reference boards. I made positive to gather quite a few references for the assorted areas of the temple via YouTube movies and Google Photographs. 

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 property, it is advisable to stay with widths which can be multiples of two or 3, making them simpler to govern in recreation engines.

For this mission, 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 property within the central space like stairs and Kund stones.

MODELING

Earlier than modeling property, notably in a big mission, it’s a necessity to resolve which of them can have distinctive texture units and which of them will use trimsheets. The pillars, arches, cow statue, wall stones, predominant deity, and Kund stones had distinctive textures. The hanging deities additionally had high-poly fashions created. Nonetheless, 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 mission, as you spend extra time on what will likely be seen extra. Then, you may transfer on to the smaller, extra fascinating props. Moreover, conserving modular items massive, helps you save time when assembling the property.

RETOPOLOGY

Retopology performs an necessary position in asset creation. The retopologized mesh mustn’t have shading artifacts; in any other case, when the textures are mip-mapped, the artifacts grow to be seen. Nonetheless, as a result of massive variety of meshes requiring retopology and strict time constraints for the mission, I could not manually retopologize this time.

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

UV

Grouping the property into totally different texture units was an intuitive and iterative course of, contemplating elements comparable to texture price range, the connection between the property, and their sizes (as measurement corresponds to UV house).

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 house.

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

TEXTURING

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

As soon as all of the property are textured, it’s essential to color-match them. Adjusting saturation and values ensures that each one the property 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 appeared off. Magic Mark has an excellent article on how to do that, they usually have narrowed down the colour profiles to make it extra manageable when utilizing it in Blender. 

When utilizing ACES in Blender, ensure that any imported property have been assigned the right colour profiles. Generally, this area could be empty, which may trigger Blender to crash in lookdev mode.

Submit-production is a vital step in giving your renders that ultimate 15% polish. DaVinci Resolve is a very nice program for video enhancing. It is free, with only some locked options that I did not discover to be an issue. You may export in 4k, the playback is clean, and the nodes are actually intuitive.

RENDER – Krishnabai Shiva Temple

Thanks on your time, I hope you loved studying this text and realized one thing helpful from it.

Have a pleasant day!

In regards to the Artist


Bhargav Kubal, a 3D artist from Vengurla, India. At present working as a freelancer.