04- The Character 3d models

The production started around August of 2018 and we finished our first set model of Dakshineshwar site quickly. Me and my team mates, Dinesh and Manoj were busy in developing our first version of Dakshineshwar Temple. We used Blender 2.79b for the entire production. We now have a complete temple building ‘To-The-Scale’ with us. It includes the main 3 Temple buildings, the Courtyard, the rooms surrounding the Courtyard, the special room of Thakur, the entrance road, Kuthi, the Chandani, simple version of ghat, the Nahabat on both ends and the North-South walkway, etc.

During the same time, we also started working on developing first-cut versions of character 3d models. We listed for many characters such as: Sri Ramkrishna, Mahendranath Gupta, Balaram Basu, Rakhal, NarendraNath, ManoMohan Mitra, RamChandra Dutta, KeshavChandra Sen, Pandit Vidyasagar etc.

My team-mates Rashnush, Pooja, Dinesh and others really helped me to produce this early versions of important characters. It is a big process to develop a single character. It starts with searching the person’s photographic references. We could find at-least one photograph of almost all important persons. Luckily, we have 3 to 4 photos of Thakur himself too. In case of others, like Swami Vivekananda, we have plenty of photo reference. Then we tried to establish the persons height and body sizes based on the photo or information from some books etc. For example, we know that Thakur’s height was about 5’10”, and Swamiji’s was about 5’8″.

From such information, we first made some base models for primary proportions and then added on top the overall body. The most difficult part of this process is obviously the face. Since we are talking about real person’s faces, it becomes even complex. But we restricted ourselves from overdoing the detailing and overworking on the accuracy at this early stage. Here my goal was to add the primary versions resembling to the respective person quickly. We can surely add mode details and make it look very realistic in coming time. And that’s the goal eventually.

Then we also modelled the cloths, hairs, beard, moustaches and in some cases the ‘props’ as they are typically called in theatres and in 3d graphics. (Props or properties are the things that the person usually carries along, like stick, hat etc.)

As of now we have our first set of 3d character base models.

Here are some rendering of them:

There are many other characters that we have done as the first pass of base models, but I have not covered them above. As you will be curious about Swamiji’s model, I have rejected all of our early attempts and we will be doing it again. We also have rejected our early attempts of many other attempts. And soon we will be scraping these current available ones to make more believable models.

That’s it for now. I will be talking about further updates in the coming posts.