[WIP] Mughal Pen Box

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Hello everyone, this is a Mughal pen box I started around a week ago.  The box was made in the 17th century and is made out of white nephrite jade, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds set in gold. 

Almost done with the modeling. Materials are placeholders. To set the gems and gold I used a combination of the shrinkwrap modifier and the extrude command.  

Haven't maintained a forum WIP thread in a long time so lemme see if I can still do it haha. 







Photo reference:

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Bit more work. Right now on the inlaid emerald which rings the stylus. 

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I still have to give it a zbrush pass but I decided to do a material test. I had forgotten how difficult setting up gems is. Rubies are too "deep" dark. Jade is pretty mediocre as well but I'll be figuring that out.

My previous Mughal daggers were done with a specgloss workflow and I was thinking of using the same here. I messed around with metal rough for the gems and being limited to only the roughness for reflectivity doesn't help.

SP and marmoset isn't even synced since SP doesn't have those refraction options.... 

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Tweaks in Marmoset 3.

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More render tests. Refined the SSS and other texture elements.

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Some more progress in my free time. Hope to do a zbrush pass next. One side of the knife handle is not visible is any reference so I'm going with some that would make the most sense. All I have is a very slight silhouette to guess what would be there.

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Trying to make more progress on this. Modeling done and now I'm adding the details and imperfections in Zbrush.