Concept Art Recreation: The Beginning

I've been playing around with Substance Designer a lot recently, and I noticed that my Art Station was starting to look a bit too one note. So I decided to find a piece of concept art and recreate completely in CG. I also want to composite in the two figures in the foreground as a live action plate.

This piece was done by an artist named Sean Vo you can find his Art Station here.

This piece may look complex but most of the assets are quite far away, so I think I'll be able to get away with a lot. The building itself seems to be some sort of Buddhist temple. Since I only have the one angle I'll be relying a lot on real life evidence to pull it together.

The other issue with the concept is that it is quite low resolution. I will need to figure out some elements for myself. For example, the material the buildings are made out of is unclear. So I'll need to do some research regarding that.

I'm not going to model any of the background mountains, because there is really no point. I'm just going to composite them in later.

Here is a breakdown of the scene.

I'll be using Maya for modeling, Substance Designer/Painter for texturing, Zbrush for sculpting and I want to learn some Houdini so I've got some ideas about how I could incorporate that. Finally I'm going to render in Vray and composite in Nuke. We will see how it goes...

Overall I think that it's going to present some interesting challenges, but should be pretty enjoyable. I'll post some updates here on my progress, document any big issues I run into.