This artist used 3DCoat and Blender to create a 3D environment full of ancient mystery

Majed Al Harbi is a freelance concept artist based in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. He's particularly interested in environment design. Below he tells us about his epic 3D environment El Patra Ruins.

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This piece was made under the mentorship of Sathish Kumar, with the challenge of creating an environment filled with unusual ruins, and to come up with a set of ideas, sketches, explorations, colours and patterns.

My idea was about the discovery of a temple built inside rocks by Bedouin travellers, inspired by the historical city of Petra, in Jordan. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. I wanted to show the power of scale and the amazing details in Islamic architecture, with the beauty of ruins built into the rocks. 3DCoat is a gem for making these kinds of architectural details.

I did all the modelling and sculpted in 3DCoat, except for the camel and people, where I used BigMediumSmall assets from Jama Jurabaev, while I also got the statue from Sketchfab. The technique here was to make my own stencils from a photo using free software called Materialize.

I picked a photo of a gate and opened it in the software, then made a displacement map. I used that as a stencil in 3DCoat to make the main gate, then moved to Blender to optimise it, and added the statue and supporting elements. It’s a great technique to make unusual pieces.

You can see more of Majed's art at via his Art Station account.

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This content originally appeared in 3D World magazine.