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 powerful 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 pleasurable to work on. For those who’ve ever heard somebody say, “It was a labor of affection,” that is what it means.
For this mission, I needed to study 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 good for this mission.
References play a significant function 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 certain to gather quite a few references for the assorted areas of the temple via YouTube movies and Google Pictures.
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 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 belongings within the central space like stairs and Kund stones.
MODELING
Earlier than modeling belongings, significantly in a big mission, it’s a necessity 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. Nonetheless, to maintain the feel price range fairly 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 shall be seen extra. Then, you’ll be able to transfer on to the smaller, extra fascinating props. Moreover, conserving modular items massive, 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 into 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 instrument, for the low-poly meshes. You merely set the discount quantity, and it reduces the mesh accordingly. The diminished 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 belongings into totally 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 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 just lately found that 16 pixels at 4k is the popular follow. This video explains it properly:
TEXTURING
Substance Painter is a strong instrument that makes texturing a hassle-free course of. Having high-resolution reference photographs 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 Additional.”
As soon as all of the belongings are textured, it’s essential to color-match them. Adjusting saturation and values ensures that every one the belongings look cohesive, and the eye would 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, make it possible for any imported belongings have been assigned the right shade profiles. Generally, this area might be empty, which may trigger Blender to crash in lookdev mode.
Put up-production is a vital step in giving your renders that remaining 15% polish. DaVinci Resolve is a extremely nice program for video enhancing. 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 easy, and the nodes are actually intuitive.
RENDER – Krishnabai Shiva Temple
Thanks in your time, I hope you loved studying this text and discovered one thing helpful from it.
Have a pleasant day!
Concerning the Artist
Bhargav Kubal, a 3D artist from Vengurla, India. At the moment working as a freelancer.
