Creating a Nephrite Jade Ewer Using ZBrush & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi, my name is Arthur Devy, and I’m an Environment Artist based in France. I’ve been studying 3D art up until 2024 and had the opportunity to join Ubisoft as a Level Artist, working on the Assassin’s Creed brand.

Going back to my childhood, I’ve always been focused on creating worlds and stories, illustrating them through drawing or other art forms. In general, visual storytelling is a passion that I try to nurture away from game art, mainly through cinema.

I started drawing landscapes and architecture in school, and after enrolling in university, 3D environment art came forth as a natural progression for my career.

Inspiration & References

I had two clear goals in mind at the start of this project.

• The first objective was to challenge myself to produce a prop in a realistic style, with a lot of attention put into the texturing work.
• The second goal was to keep it within a reasonable time frame (about a month, not working full-time on it) and pick a subject accordingly.

As for how I picked my reference object, I tried looking for something that fit my personal tastes, featured interesting ornamental details, and materials used. Sites like Pinterest usually help me to kickstart my research and get out of my comfort zone; I ended up finding the main reference while looking at different ewers on antique sites.

As some of the pictures were too low-res to make out some of the details, I cross-referenced from other ewers of the same period and style, as well as other antiques, and redesigned some bits myself. While this is most definitely the hardest part for me, I enjoy the process of trying to understand the defining traits and elements of an aesthetic, in order to make adjustments that feel faithful and
respectful to the source object. 

Modeling

The modeling for most of the ewer was straightforward and done in Blender. Since it consisted of very simple shapes, I focused on trying to match the general feel of my reference as much as possible, while making adjustments when I felt it was needed. For example, I added notches and creases on the overall silhouette in spots where I thought I could add grime and wear later on during texturing.

As for the metal ornaments, I fully modeled them in Blender, trying to keep a dense enough topology for close-up shots of the model, and as I knew I would mostly sculpt and bake indents on top.

The most demanding part of the modeling process was making the two dragon heads featured on the pouring spout and handle. For the sculpting part, it’s important to make sure that your document is properly set up in ZBrush, such as ensuring that your subtools are properly scaled to get the most out of the DynaMesh feature, and that your model is centered in a way that can save you time when you have symmetrical repeating parts.

I started by splitting the volumes, shaping up the heads using basic shapes and the Move brush, then did a secondary detail pass and finally merged and dynameshed the parts together.

Retopology & Unwrapping

Retopology and unwrap steps were quite fast. Right from the start, I knew I wanted the texture details to hold up when up close, and after researching, I ended up settling on a texel density of 150px/cm². I tend to UV as I model, so I mainly had to do a quality check and pack the straightened islands using the UV-packer add-on in Blender.

For the dragon heads that were done entirely in ZBrush, as I was not concerned with achieving a very low polycount, I simply decimated them and did a manual cleanup pass for stray vertices and stretched triangles, as well as the UVs in Blender. In the end, the final model ended up around the 90K triangle mark.

Baking was achieved in Marmoset Toolbag, combining sculpted elements and my manually subdivided base model for the high poly.

Texturing

First step in texturing for this project, I hopped onto Substance 3D Designer to work on a Jade material that I had been wanting to make for quite some time. I wanted to achieve something similar to the reference, with accentuated details to ensure the material was interesting to look at on its own.

I started by creating a base similar to a rock material with interesting ridges and overlapping layers, using warp nodes to achieve the organicity found in metamorphic-type rocks. For that step, I recommended checking out Daniel Thiger rock creation techniques.

Following that base, 70% of the material creation consisted of adjusting different gradient maps for the base color and blending in interesting noise textures for the Roughness and Normal maps.

As for Painter, I worked on getting strong base materials first, for the metal parts, the clay beads, and the jade for the ewer’s belly, and then focused on micro details later on: scratches, oxidation, heat marks, etc, applied with hand-painting.

The specific goal I was looking for was that of an object that feels “lived in,” that has passed through many hands and ultimately ended up being preserved in good conditions, as if it had been cleaned up by a curator who had kept it clean without brushing off every bit of dirt and debris.

I finished by doing a dirt and fine dust global pass to unify the overall look of the ewer and make plain areas more interesting.

Rendering & Lighting

For this project, I chose to render it on a black background consisting of a slope mesh, so the attention would be focused on the centerpiece, and I didn’t feel like modeling or adding other scene elements.

When rendering a prop, I tend to start by picking a LUT or tonemapping preset I like, in this case, the ACES color space with adjusted exposure values. I then browse sites like PolyHaven, testing different HDR textures in my scene, to get a feel of the model features I want to emphasize.

Once I’ve picked a suitable one for my base lighting, I usually set up a very basic three-point lighting situation, and then make adjustments from there, adding spotlights and pointlights to reinforce the silhouette and highlight certain areas.

I also like to add very subtle touches of colors in my spotlights settings, to make the final renders pop more.

As for post-processing settings, I kept it very simple and simply tweaked the exposure and contrast settings. The two rendering features I used the most were camera depth-of-field and film grain; adding film grain to your renders is key to giving the eye an interesting surface to look at and break up plain areas. For this project, I also liked the idea of going for a look similar to an analog photograph taken by an antique curator.

Conclusion

Looking back at this project, I’m satisfied because I’ve managed to finish it with a level of quality I deemed adequate and fitting in the time window I had allocated to it beforehand. The best advice I could give to anyone getting started with a similar project would be to spend a lot of time researching solid references (similar materials in different lighting conditions, detailed close-ups) and blocking out the general silhouette, as strong bases are key to ensuring the following steps go along smoothly.

Thanks for reading!