Elden Ring Glintstone Kris Shortsword Made in Maya, ZBrush & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

Hello everyone. My name is ShangYu Wang, and I’m 22 years old. I’m currently based in Shanghai, China, working as a 3D environment artist. I majored in Film and Television back in college. Since I’ve always been passionate about video games, I signed up for a game art training course, which eventually led me to this career path.

I love designing weaponry, both firearms and melee cold weapons. Whenever I work on a piece, I can’t help imagining myself wielding these weapons and crushing foes in battle, haha. Most of my creative inspiration comes from real-life objects and video games. I enjoy reimagining them and reworking the visuals with my own unique artistic style.

For this project, a team of friends and I collaborated on original concept art themed around Elden Ring. I’m a huge fan of this game myself. I picked the Glintstone Shortsword as my subject because it’s incredibly distinctive and exquisitely detailed. I’ve always been drawn to intricate designs, plus the sword is covered in crystals, an area I hadn’t experimented with before. I wanted to challenge myself and fill this gap in my skill set, so I won’t feel intimidated when creating crystal-based assets in future projects.

Here’s the ArtStation link to the artwork.

Getting Started

First, I search for the official concept image of this weapon and then, separately, find reference images for each component.

Next, I break down the lore behind this weapon. Most of this is purely my personal speculation; I didn’t check the official lore at all. Creating freely based only on my own imagination is where I get the most joy, without letting other people’s perspectives influence my design.

In my interpretation, the Glintstone Kris Shortsword is an ornate, exquisitely crafted short blade. I don’t think it was meant for prolonged combat; instead, it primarily serves to showcase its wielder’s noble status or carry out assassinations. For this reason, I avoided worn, dirty textures and weathered detailing when building the model and materials, aiming to convey its delicate and regal aura.

With this core design concept established, I moved on to bringing my vision to life using 3D software. My standard workflow consists of these key stages:

1. Block out the model in Maya to finalize proportions.
2. Sculpt high-poly details in ZBrush.
3. Paint textures with Substance 3D Painter.
4. Final rendering in Marmoset Toolbag 5.
   Let’s go through each production step in detail.

Maya Blockout

When creating the blockout, I skip all fine details entirely. I focus solely on refining the silhouette and the depth hierarchy between different model parts, such as the wrapped textures on the hilt, hollow cutouts of the guard, and curves and transitions along the blade.

I also need to consider whether the mesh thickness will work well for later sculpting in ZBrush. Fixing all geometric errors at this initial stage drastically streamlines the entire sculpting workflow.

High-Poly Detailing in ZBrush

This stage marks the official high-detail sculpting phase of the model. My asset features many branch-like structures, so I rely on the SnakeHook brush paired with Sculptris Pro mode. This combination lets me quickly block out the forms I envision without worrying about polygon counts; I only need to adjust brush size as needed.

At this stage, I focused on the branch details wrapping around the middle scabbard and hilt. I constantly checked whether their silhouettes and curves felt natural, and ensured the winding branches looked logical and aesthetically pleasing.

The crystal sculpting on the scabbard follows a straightforward workflow: I used rock brushes to carve large blocky textures. It’s critical to maintain contrast in scale and balance dense/sparse detailing. Once the rough textures were laid down, I decimated the mesh to a low polygon count, which created triangular surface patterns across the model. I then re-dynameshed to add more geometry, allowing further refinement. I also carved subtle wear marks to boost the model’s richness and overall completion level.

I built the scabbard as two separate mesh layers to simulate crystal light refraction and reflection. The outer layer will be assigned high transparency values during texturing for a more convincing crystalline effect. Since I had no prior experience crafting crystal materials, this layered approach is my experimental idea. I will finalize whether to keep this setup once I move on to the material painting stage.

Texture Creation with Substance 3D Painter

Feel free to watch the video first to get a general idea of my texturing workflow. I’ll then walk you through the little creative tricks I used when creating the metal and crystal materials.

First off, for base colors, I only focus on the inherent hue of each material and ignore all later tonal variations. At this initial stage, I avoid making the colors overly bright or dark; a neutral gray tone works best, as it lets us freely layer highlights and shadows with highly visible results.

Next, we enrich the metal tones. I source metal reference images, sample their color palettes, and overlay those hues onto the asset to amplify metallic texture. You can see the visual difference this creates.

Next, we’ll boost the model’s dimensionality by utilizing baked AO and curvature maps. Let’s apply them and observe the visual improvements.

Next, we keep enriching the textures by adding handcrafted artistic details based on my personal aesthetic.

Alright, the metal texture is nearly finished at this point, yet I felt it still lacked eye-catching details to elevate the look, so I kept refining it to raise the overall polish. You can check the comparison shots below.

For this step, I enriched the tones in shadowed crevices and boosted their saturation, brightened all the tip sections, and adjusted color values to break up repetitive-looking mesh parts. With these adjustments, I wrapped up work on the metal material.

Now moving on to the crystal material. Let’s first go over its general creation workflow. As I mentioned during the high-poly sculpting phase, the crystal scabbard was built in two separate mesh layers. Here you can see the outer layer: I cranked its transparency all the way up to nearly invisible, while retaining sharp specular highlights from reflections, and that’s exactly the effect I’m after. It might look odd when previewed inside Painter, but I can tweak it in post-rendering to achieve a more authentic, lifelike crystal appearance.

The crystal material creation process is fairly straightforward. I only used standard common operations without any special custom techniques. You can refer to the video to follow each step for a clearer understanding.

Render Scene Setup

The rendering scene I set up is quite basic, requiring only a few simple operations. 

I only used three simple lights: a skylight, a key light and a rim light.

I placed the key light on the petal section to the right, cranked up its intensity and tinted it warm. The light on the left has lower intensity with cool tones. This warm-cold contrast balances the whole composition nicely.

Since the materials and textures were fully refined earlier, barely any post-processing is needed to get satisfying renders. My main focus was framing a good composition.

Next, I’ll break down the composition of my cover image.

The visual focal point lies within the golden ratio intersection slightly left of frame center, with three tiers of visual weight:

Primary Focal Point: The Central Emerald

This large green gemstone wrapped in twisting vines delivers the only highly saturated cool tone against the warm bronze-gold metal and deep dark blue base of the whole piece. The metallic vines converge inward, with every curling line drawing the eye straight to the gem, making it the core visual anchor of the image.

Secondary Focal Point: The Blue Crystal Below

Made up of large translucent icy-blue crystals paired with golden tree-shaped embossing, it occupies the largest area of the composition. It guides the viewer’s gaze downward from the emerald and fills the lower half of the frame, balancing the dense tangle of vines in the upper left.

Supporting Focal Point: The Crystal Staff Tip in the Upper Right

As a secondary prop, this small, highly transparent blue crystal echoes the blue crystals down below in color. It offsets the empty negative space on the right side of the canvas and prevents the image from feeling lopsided and heavy on the left.

The text ELDEN RING FAN ART sits centered on the vertical midline in the upper half of the frame, set against a plain dark background with no props covering it. It serves two compositional purposes:

Weight balancing: The ornate, dense staff and weaponry fill the heavy lower portion of the image, while the upper half consists mostly of empty black negative space. The golden title text fills the void at the top to equalize visual weight top and bottom, stopping the whole frame from feeling bottom-heavy.

There’s another crucial section about camera settings. I usually enable the focus feature to render close-up shots, which makes the model look much more realistic.

There are also other adjustable parameters, none of which have fixed values. You need to understand what each parameter does, then tweak them according to your own model.

We also need to tweak several settings since an emissive map is used for the crystal material.

First, I start with Marmoset Toolbag’s default glass material as the base and apply my textures onto it.

The Transmission parameter is particularly important. Let’s take a look at the render result with it disabled.

The render still looks acceptable without it, but I feel the model edges lack enough detail. Enabling Transmission adds richer edge variations, as you can see here.

Ultimately, you can turn it on or off based on your own needs. That covers my entire personal material creation workflow.

Conclusion

Since I’m already working full-time, I don’t have much spare time for personal art projects. I worked on this piece on and off for roughly a month. Most of my time was spent on high-poly sculpting and rendering.

The biggest challenge for me was creating the crystal material, as I’d never tackled crystal assets before. After lots of trial and research, I managed to grasp the core workflow for crystal shading, though there are still plenty of areas to improve. I’ll keep pushing myself to get better!

Lastly, a practical piece of advice for those new to 3D modeling: take your time to fully finish a high-quality asset with simple structures.

Lots of beginners rush to create overly intricate props or characters loaded with excessive fine details just to follow others’ examples. More often than not, they cannot stick out the long production cycle. Meanwhile, they fail to properly handle topology, materials, rendering, and other key elements, resulting in final work filled with obvious flaws.

A better approach is to focus on small, low-complexity objects first. Go through the entire standardized production workflow step by step, and polish textures, lighting and all subtle details to a high standard. These small yet fully refined models work far better in your portfolio when applying for jobs.

Lastly, wish everyone a bright future. Thank you to 80 Level for this interview.

ShangYu Wang, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Stephanie Almogabar