Egyptian jewelry masterpiece recreated in 3D from one museum photo.
King Tutankhamun’s Sacred Winged Scarab Pectoral
Modeled and rendered in BLENDER 3.6
This jewel is in great part one of the main reasons I completed my jewelry craftsmanship professional formation, and is also one of my favorite jewels in human history.
When I started my apprenticeship as a jeweler, I was surronded by intellectuals and academics, yes my friends and family, all expecting me to follow the same path and to get at least one PHD. The thing is that at 18, I was already starting to become a renowned painter, and at 20 I had already quit 3 different carrears, but never stopped painting…
As a kid, I was mainly interested in history, geometry and design. And like for many people around me, jewelry was mostly a very superficial craft, and jewels the expression of much vanity. And when I started my path to become a jeweller, it was even a bigger crisis with the people surrounding me. Only maybe one or 2 friends would understand, out of that nobody in my family would, not even remotely, support my choice.
But when I really started studying jewelry to see behind the curtains, then jewels like these became my best allies against the ignorance and prejudice surrounding me about jewelry. If you think about it, jewelry has been in everyday human lives for about 80,000 years…
Screenshot, model is hi-res, 5 millions faces
Render version 2, the beads hanging at the bottom straightened out
I also made a short 4K animation, finding the adequate music was harder than expected, mostly because most modern egyptian music is tacky and cliché, so I had to keep a firm ear to avoid that tackiness . Let’s hope I managed
I am also working on a video of the 3D modeling process of the jewel and some explanations of the symbols, but the edition is taking me weeks instead of days, so I will post that video some other day.
I have been using and teaching Blender for professional 3D jewelry design for about 7 years now.
