Himalayan Treasures: Ancient Shankha - Kyle S. Smith

kylessmith

Name: Kyle S. Smith
Country: United States
I have read the terms and conditions and am eligible for prizes

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Main Concept Idea

While digging into as much culture and history as I possibly could this evening, I came across the Shankha.
It was used in religious ceremonies and rituals to ward off evil spirits, prevent natural disasters and frighten monsters. Because of it's unique sound, it is often represented as the spoken voice of Buddha. I will be gathering more references and post my full PureRef soon!

kylessmith

Reference Gathering and Planning

I knew that I liked the design and intricate details in the Shankha, but wanted to explore more details.

For this prop, I'm going to work in a High to Low-Poly workflow. I like to identify primitives, patterns and proportions before I start any of my work.

kylessmith

Day 1: Primitive Blockout

My original blockout came from Maya. I used the measure tool to accurately define the length and width of my shapes before I got started. After that, I moved some primitives around to define the overall shape of the asset.

Tomorrow will be primarily focused on sculpting the primary forms.

kylessmith

Day 2: Primary

Had a free hour to work on my Shankha so I started moving on to the primary forms in the sculpt.

I want to keep the silver and shell materials separate, so I extracted a masked portion of the shell and created a new subtool to work off of for the decorative trim.

kylessmith

Day 3: Prepping for Secondary

Went back into Zbrush to change a few things that I wasn't too satisfied with on my asset. Every silver object is now it's own extracted subtool. Doing this allows me to make use of a wider variety of techniques to add details.

A big part of my workflow when it comes to adding the fillagree will be masking areas and using standard/inflate. Tomorrow I plan on creating any large decorative pieces for the silver.

kylessmith

Day 4: Secondary Forms

After trying a few different techniques, like making roll brushes and different alphas, I found out quickly that the masking workflow is going to work best when it comes to creating all the intricate shapes that this piece has.

Depending on how complex the designs are, I create dragrect alphas to use from a mesh.

kylessmith

Day 5: Tigers 'n Stuff

More progress on the Shankha. Rather than sculpting out the tigers shape into a drag rect brush, I used an alpha for a mask then inverted and inflated. I then used the alpha on top of the masked portion to pull out details that I'll chip away at, depending on how damaged or preserved I want these details to be.

kylessmith

Day 6: Wrap up secondary details

Next week will be nothing but tertiary details and optimization. I'll go back through and refine/beat up areas of the sculpt that need it and prep it for texturing.

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Day 7: Final sculpted details

Like any project, I could stay on one section forever. I finalized some of the details and added a few extras. Next will be retopology and texturing.

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Day 8: Retopology and first texture pass

For the low/mid poly, all I did was decimate down like crazy until I had a workable mesh. UV's took a relatively short amount of time after testing my bakes.

After getting my maps baked, I created custom materials for the Shankha by building up each value in layers

I like how the turquoise gem stones turned out in this first texture pass. I created my own custom crack alpha using photoshop.

First pass render along with a first texture pass is done. Still a bit of tweaking left to do (like giving this gorgeous item an environment to live in). Next steps will be to create a suitable stage for it to be displayed.

kylessmith

Day 9 : Additional Texture Pass/Test Renders

Got some great feedback from a few different groups on discord and was able to refine my textures.
I like using Marmoset Toolbag for renders. Being able to quickly stage a prop and get different looks and feels with your lighting setup makes it such an incredible tool.

The rest of my time will be spent making final texture adjustments, setting up my camera angles, and pushing out renders

kylessmith

Final Submission: Ancient Shankha

An artifact found in the Tibetan region of the Himalaya's, the Shankha was and still is used to this day in various religious ceremonies. It's said that the sacred "Om" sound that the Shankha produce would ward off evil spirits and be representative of the spoken voice of Buddha.

Sculpted in Zbrush, textured in Substance Painter and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 4. This was an incredible opportunity to learn more about the Himalaya's and the rich history/culture of it's inhabitants.

Cheers everyone! I can't wait to see all the submissions!

tibobo

Great job !