Category: Personal

From the start my main goal for my personal was focusing on modeling and texturing, throughout my personal I worked on my model and learned a lot from it. This project was a lot of going back and forth on the design, while I was working on this project I had a lot of times where I had to redo certain parts of either the model or the lay out. I am happy with the end result of the temple with the vines on them, A difficult part of this project was also creating the mountain. This was more of an organic workflow that I still had to learn as well as that doing the texture on the mountain was quite challenging.

Looking back at my project I think there are some things that I would work more on or pay some more detail to. As an example I think the fog is a little bit to thick to where the temple disappears a bit. Also if I would have a bit longer I would have liked to composite more mountains in the background, I tried to shape this a bit by copying the mountain I had created and using this in the background as well. But overall I really enjoyed doing this project and creating all the different parts for it, I have learned a lot in this process.

I am nearing the end of my personal project, As shown in my last post I had made the mountain and the rocks. These are two elements that I want to use that have a slight simulation on them. I created the rocks to let these drop down on the side of the temple and there will be dust flowing on the mountain (a very dusty area).

In the second test video you can also see that I have added dust in the scene. This dust comes up from the mountain and flows up towards the sky covering the temple in dust. and also below this text you can view some images with the dust flowing around in the scene.

Now I moved on to creating the mountain for the scene and the rocks that will be simulated to fall down the Temple tower. I had some difficulty creating the mountain in maya. I would like to try and create the mountain in another way for next time. but when looking back the creation made with the textures feel quite aligned with my scene. Of course there can be many different ways of creating the mountain but for now I choose to play around and stick with the style I had created.

When looking at the substance painter file and at the file in maya I realized that the UV’s where a bit stretchy. I went back to the UV’s and made it to where the mountain is less stretchy and then I went into Substance painter and redid the bake on the mountain. Below this text you can also see the rocks I created for the simulation of the scene. These rocks will be falling on the side of the tower.

Since I was quite far with the modelling I started doing the texture on the different elements of the temple.

Throughout the whole temple I wanted a kind of similar textured look, sometimes lighter in color and sometimes darker in color. So I exported my temple segments in maya to FBX and placed them into Substance Painter.

As seen in the image every pillar has the same UV, this includes every detail on the pillar so the leaves/the top parts etc. Doing the textures in Substance I played around with the main part of the pillar to get the right color and then used this texture on different elements through the tower. I had to adjust them slightly according to the differences in UV’s

For some parts I decided to go with a lighter color like the fence gate and the block that holds everything up. The final result had a nice general look of a temple. With cracks added to it so the temple looks quite a bit older. the cracks are added with texturing using Heights. Below you can see the total image but then in Maya, It is quite the same looking as in substance but still looks a little bit different. When moving files from substance to Maya you can see that it shows a difference. This is mainly due to the lighting situation.

In this period of working on my Personal project I came to the phase of doing the UV of the models I created. Also while doing this I realized that there were some items missing in the scene that would make the whole scene look a bit more interesting.

Starting off this day I created a wonky stair path so that in the scene you would be able to go up the stairs to the temple.

After creating the elements I wanted for the Temple tower I started doing the UV’s on the different shapes. Since a lot of my elements are copied I narrowed my scene for the UV down to all the individual objects that need an unique UV. This way I didn’t need to UV multiple times the same object, I started off with doing the UV on the pillars and also the small stairs I created.

After Creating these UV’s I redid my duplicate special for all the parts and made sure that everything is the same again so the vines would still fit in the scene.

When I Was looking at the model I still felt like there was something missing in the center of the build. When I did some online searches I came to the idea of creating a marble fountain that would fit well with the style of the build. First I found a reference image that I placed in the maya scene and tried to remake this as a 3D model.

Above this text, you can see the references I found and for my own fountain I choose to go with the reference you see on the left. Below this text I started off with a part of the main pillar and I designed one of the segments that would go around the pillar for the part that would have the water of the fountain inside of it. after finishing the middle part I created the four different layers and duplicated special around the middle pillar.

Since all the other parts already had the UV’s I did a really quick UV map on my marble fountain and then exported this to go into substance painter so I could create the marble texture of the fountain. Above this text you can see the marble texture I created in substance painter and the image below shows an example of the textures in maya. overall had the fountain the same marble texture and I also added a little bit of green dirt to add to the detail.

Lastly for this blogpost, I also created some stone fencing that I have created for the middle segments to add some detail through the scene. I placed the 2 layers between the heights of the model. An example of the placement is shown in the image below.

After the last post, I finished the bigger layer of my temple tower and towered it up so it has 3 layers. To add to the temple tower I searched this tutorial that you see below to learn how to add Ivy to my build, this will make it look old/realistic because it is an overgrown environment. After watching this tutorial I implemented the Ivy to my build.

I spent the whole day working on where to add the Ivy and how to make it look overgrown. As shown in the tutorial You have to use a spline tool to create the pathing of the Ivy. I also learned in this tutorial that it is quite easy to make this Ivy move and since this scene is going to be slightly moving I think this would be adding that extra small detail to the total image.

Here are some images of the process and detailing the Ivy adds to the scene. As you can see in the images the leaves are still only squares instead of looking like real leaves. I will need an alpha image to add the depth to the leaves and make them look real.

After the start I made on the pillar I made before I started to rethink the design of the model I made and of how I want to portray my version of a temple. For this I went on pinterest and went on a search for some more reference images. With these reference Images I created a mood board where I can view different elements of the different temples I searched. (see the moodboard below this text.

I started off by recreating the pillars, for the pillar model I followed a tutorial to get the look viewed in the picture. You can click this link to be directed to the tutorial used to get the models. Referring to the mood board you can see in the top right that there are two temples that have a circle shape. I used these references to also get to my circle shape that I think will be a good idea for my design.

I have stacked these pillars on top of each other to get the temple to have more height. The idea would be that this temple would be standing on the side of mountain, the idea/inspiration is shown in the mood board. (see the second image) I will be adding a lot more detail to this model and want to try working in layers. I started with making the diameter of the circular building a bit bigger and adding the details to this. (see image below) Of course there still need to be added a lot of detail and a lot of changes to the model.

I decided to test out the idea of baking on a more detailed mesh on top of my pillar. For this I started off in maya and exporting the low poly pillar foot to import it into Zbrush. I did a simple automatic UV-map because this is only a test to see how it would work (as shown in the image below)

Then I imported this in Zbrush and did a simple carve on the mesh so that I can figure out how to bake this on top of the low poly pillar foot. I exported this mesh and opened substance painter and baked the high poly mesh on top of the low poly mesh.

Since the test worked I focused on what kind of engravings I want on the foot of the pillar. Using 2 different reference images I created this detail for the pillar (see the image below)