Temple of the Radiant Dawn

Greetings! The work I want to present focuses on creating an ancient temple dedicated to the sun, lost in the Cambodian forest. I focused my efforts on modeling and texturing the statues and the environment set, while generating all the foliage and most of the biome aspects using Megascan and Quixel.

While the arch and the statue are entirely sculpted, for the Hydra, I decided to start with a 3D scan as the base of the model. Then, I sculpted all the details, deformations, and chipped edges to create a more realistic version of the model. I also took some models from the Quixel Abandoned Temple Collection that I found suited the mood.

I created the meshes entirely in ZBrush, UV-mapped them in Maya, and then textured them in Painter.

In the process, you can see that I changed my mind during execution. I made the "rookie" mistake of creating a wide and perhaps too generic PureRef board for this work, combining generic "forest temple references." This led me to have half the references as "Mayan" and the other half as "Cambodian" architecture, both of which have significant meanings of the sun in their religions. So, I decided to stick with the Cambodian architecture and reworked all the hero assets in the scene.

Thanks to Houdini, I also created a Houdini Digital Asset to speed up my workflow for the set dressing part. This is a simple tool that helped me populate my scene with other meshes such as bushes, plants, vines, and rocks. It has two modes: one is a simple grid that can be placed over the landscape, and the second can be attached to a mesh (it works really well with big meshes like rocks or packed level actors) and then scatter on the entire surfaces.

The lighting was the hardest but also the most rewarding part. My initial idea was to create a sacred place where the Sun plays a key role as the main protagonist. However, I also wanted to evoke a sense of serenity and freshness in the scene, which can only be achieved with shadows and softly diffused light.

For these reasons, I made a hole in the statue's face to let the sun be the protagonist of the scene, allowing the light to pass through the shapes of the hole and the arch. At the same time, I aimed to achieve a sense of breeze with the soft light.

At the end i sitck with this light scenario and scultp the godrays in the scene using the rocks and foliage in between which at the end gave me the mood I was seeking for.

I also want to thanks all my friends and collegues from D-wok for the support they gave to me during this work through feedbacks and tips :)

Thanks for reading and hope you like it!