Texturing
Hello everyone! We are already in the last week of the challenge, and I'm excited to see the final result and to see yours as well!
I have been working on the textures of the prayer wheel in Substance Painter, and although it's not ready yet, I am getting close to the desired result. My workflow consists of starting with simple materials and then adding layers of color variations to build more complex and realistic materials, paying close attention to references and trying to get as close as possible, but also considering my taste and artistic direction. Another thing I do is open a project in Marmoset with a neutral HDRI like Studio Tomoco (the same one I use in Painter) to see how the materials look in the engine where I will do the final renders.
I prepared several alphas in Photoshop of silhouettes of Dakinis and Ashta Mangalas. I took some references of these elements and converted them into alphas by using the black and white filter, curves to increase the contrast, and touching up certain areas with the brush to make them look good. I also downloaded a Tibetan alphabet font and wrote the most famous mantras to inscribe them along the object in the form of a normal map, adding visual and cultural richness.
Holder
I also made a sort of holder for the prayer wheel in the shape of a fish, which was present in the references I found. I mainly modeled it with subdivisions and booleans. Initially, I considered doing a manual retopology, but since I didn't have much time and the object is intended to be static, I opted for a decimated geometry using ZBrush's Decimation Master. I created the high poly using remesher + smooth in Blender. I also did the UVs in Blender, and I have to say that creating the seams on the decimated geometry was very challenging since it was my first time doing it, and I had many issues during the bake. Ironically, it might have been more practical to do the retopology directly.
To finish, I'll leave you with a screenshot of the holder's texturing, which is almost finished. I followed the same workflow mentioned earlier, with the particularity that I find wood very complex to texture. However, in my previous project, I had to texture a wooden grip, so I studied quite a bit on how to texture this type of material.
The next time I make a post, it will probably be the final presentation. So, thank you very much for following my progress and good luck to everyone in the challenge!
