Date of Completion: November 2021
For this project it started with an idea in my head. I saw a giant temple overlooking the ocean, surrounded by trees and overgrown foliage, this water drop symbol covering its front facade. I sketched the idea in procreate and then created the composition in blender.
I learned a new workflow with the program 3DCoat and had a blast sculpting and creating everything in the project myself, besides the textures.
I used textures.com for the rock and the tree/vine textures. Everything else was created myself using material nodes.
Programs Used: Blender & 3D Coat
Concept Creation
These are the sketches I started with. Yes, bask your eyes on my glorious work. Also, please don't tell anybody I draw like this.
Inspiration
Also Bob Ross because he's always inspiration.
Modeling and Initial Block Out
I started by created molding patters for archways leading to the temple and for the temple itself. I used 3D coat for this and extruded my molding patterns into arches. I also modeled the basic shape of the temple using primitives in blender. This helped me with moving onto adding smaller details.
I used the same kind of method as my first client project the Frere Du andre. I focused on macro details, then to micro details.
At this stage I was really just following my heart. Meaning, I had no idea what I was doing.
I knew the basic shape of what I wanted, and I figured I could get creative with smaller details as I needed to along the project. Probably. Maybe?
I modeled the front of the temple in blender. I was going for a bit of that 5th-century keep feeling. I also created a circular window molding that will frame the gemstone water droplets I create down the line.
I then moved to creating the water drop shapes. I drew the shape in Photoshop and then turned it into a vector in Illustrator. I then traced the image with vertices in blender and extruded the shape. I brought it into 3D coat and shaped it into a cut jewel style using the cut tool.
I modeled a few additional details to the building and created the dome top to it.
Texture Creation and Stenciling
I mentioned I didn't make any textures. I did make some, but just for stencil detailing.
This part of the workflow was new to me. I was reading about the stencil tool in 3D coat and that's what initially got me interested in trying it out. The stencil tool allows you to paint detail onto geometry using an image texture. I read the user guide and learned the color value 127 denotes a flat height to the geometry and anything below is higher, and anything above is lower.
I attempted to create my own textures to stencil onto the sides of the temple and to detail other parts. The first stencil I made was the general brick pattern. I created the bricks using noise and distortion in Photoshop and laid them out in a brick wall pattern.
It took me ages to get the texture to look like rough stone - in fact, it took 7 hours and 17 tries of pure struggle before the stencil texture looked... ok.
I pushed on, created another stencil with the water drops as a sort of banner. I then stenciled that onto the sides of the giant arch like structure so it would feel more fitting to the concept as a whole.
Continuing on, I modeled more details in blender like the base of the temple and front wall. I then brought those as well as the dome into 3DCoat and started sculpting and stenciling more detail into them.
Trees
For the trees I created the geometry using spline to geometry function in blender. For the texture I used a leaf texture I found on the web and used a particle scatter to distribute it along the tree geometry. I then scattered that along my placeholder landscape geometry.
I used vertex painting to determine where the trees appeared in the particle scatter. I did this so I could stop trees from scattering to parts of the geometry that weren't in the frame. It saved me on render times and view-port performance.
Things were finally looking like stuff. Yay.
Landscape
I then sculpted the main landscape landmasses in 3D coat using a variety of their tools to try and get a rocky look. I then used a few stencils to add roughness to the pattern.
Voila, I made wall.
I added in the landscape re-scattered the trees onto their surface.
More Modeling
I added more details like booling out a doorway entrance for the temple. I also created a giant door frame for the entrance.
A Nightmare, Realized.
Why is UV unwrapping so scary dad?
I began the process of UV unwrapping all my models. I do not have much experience in the way of it so I did the best I could. It was extremely tough and things went horribly wrong for a couple days of attempts.
The landscape was a nightmare to UV unwrap as it was quite high poly. I then decimated the landscape models while trying to preserve the quality enough so UV unwrapping wouldn't be so difficult. It still was - I never want to do this again. But it is the necessary evil of this 3D world... and so I will do it.
I applied textures and box mapped some objects while using trilinear mapping on others. It was a struggle.
0/10 - Would not do again. But will have to anyway.
Finally, I created the water using a glass shader and tweaked the roughness so it would look like waves. The overgrowth geometry was created with splines and draped/particle scattered everywhere to give it that ancient feeling.
That's everything I did for this project! Thanks for reading!
