I grew up in a simple Indian family that lived by devoutly religious values. That every act was to be performed while keeping in mind the values and blessings of the divine force was taught to us right from the beginning. In our culture every religious function, festive celebration or holy or new endeavor begins with the invocation of Ganesha, the god with the face of an elephant. To be honest, I've had a stronge affiliation with him ever since I can remember. So it was, I now feel, a very obvious progression for me that further on in my life, when I grew up to become a CG modeler, my first choice would be to model him. One can see it as my humble offering to the divine power.

When I finally summed up enough courage to begin this gigantic work, I decided that I wanted to create a detailed statue of Lord Ganesha, which would simultaneously evoke his divinity. I wanted to sculpt him and bring him out the way I grew up seeing him in my mind, which made the effort all the more difficult. But as they say, "If you think you can, you can”… and so began the journey.

Before I started to model, I went through lots of reference images of Ganesha idols. After having studied them, I did some basic doodling and finally came up with what I have modeled. The entire model was primarily done in Maya. My life would have been easier had I been using ZBrush for all the intricate detailing of the accessories, but I wanted to enjoy the challenge of working with Maya.

I took a cube and started to roughly block out the shape of the body (Fig.01 – 02).




After I got the basic T pose shape, I fixed the second set of arms from the back of the shoulder in a way that it wouldn't look disproportionate (Fig.03).


After blocking the body, I focused on the head and gradually brought it to a shape that matched the look that I had visualized (Fig.04).