How to Sculpt and Texture a Stylized Wayfinder-Inspired Scythe

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name is Artem, and I'm 23. I've loved video games since childhood, so while studying engineering at university, I decided to try my hand at 3D and ended up going down that path instead. I started with Blender four years ago: for the first two years I made low-poly dioramas following YouTube guides, without really knowing where to go next. Later, after discovering the 3dex channel, I found ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter, which sparked my desire to dive into stylization — something I'm still doing to this day.

I watched a lot of tutorials on YouTube from different artists, trying to absorb their approach to building stylized models. Just as important, I think, was finding a community of like-minded people: many of them became friends I still talk to, and who keep pushing me forward.
During this time, I worked on two projects.

The first was Autonomica from Crytivo, where I did hard-surface modeling in a style close to Fortnite or Overwatch, on everything from small props to large antennas. The second is an unreleased cinematic for a popular game, where I created subdivision hard-surface environment assets. Unfortunately, I can't share more details about it, but I'm sure everyone will love it when it comes out.

My current toolset:

• Blender
• Photoshop
• Substance 3D Painter
• Marmoset Toolbag · Unreal Engine
• ZBrush
• TopoGun
• 3DCoat
• RizomUV

Scythe

It usually happens that my commercial projects keep me focused on hard-surface modeling, which doesn't give me much room to sharpen my sculpting skills, even though I love it. So my main goal was to pick a piece that would let me practice organic sculpting, and at the same time make something for my own social media.

I think I'm far from the only one who loves the Wayfinder art style: a huge number of artists pull concepts and references from that project for their own work, and not without reason. Wayfinder's style is genuinely striking in how it combines demanding sculpting with stylized PBR texturing and hand-painting, so there was never really a question of where to look for a reference.

I've always loved corrupted weapons and props, so I picked a scythe designed by the very talented concept artist Baldi Konijn, and my main reference for sculpting and materials was Guillaume Provost, who made the original 3D model. This piece would let me try my hand at a complex organic sculpt and also experiment with textures.

Modeling

My modeling process usually starts with assessing the concept: I try to figure out which elements I'll need and how best to build each of them. I decided to do the blockout in Blender: the blade, the handle, and the other inorganic elements were easier to build there.

First I built a low-poly mesh, then refined the shape with creases and subdivided it before exporting it to ZBrush for sculpting. I didn't block out the main "creature" on the scythe in Blender at all, since it's too complex — I just used a simple sphere and moved all further work to the sculpting stage.

Once the blockout is done, I export everything into ZBrush. The first thing I worked on was the basic shapes of the "slug" creature on the scythe, to get a better sense of proportions and overall silhouette. As I mentioned, I started from a simple sphere, pulling and DynaMesh-ing it into the shape I needed.

Two brushes work great for this: Move (the AccuCurve mode really helps) and SnakeHook. I also often use ClayBuildup and Smooth to refine the form — they let me get a solid enough result quickly at this stage.

The next stage is polishing the main "hero" element on the scythe. Here I usually drop DynaMesh for organic details: my pipeline relies on a combination of ZRemesher and Divide. That lets me adjust large forms at low subdiv levels while polishing or adding fine detail at higher levels on a dense mesh. This approach noticeably sped up and simplified both detailing and adding large forms during polishing.

This stage is my favorite, but also the longest one: to get a perfectly smooth, clean surface, I run Smooth, Gio_Soft, and Move over and over on different parts of the model, at different mesh densities. Since the model isn't symmetrical, it takes even more time. Still, polishing remains one of my favorite stages — it's a pretty meditative process where the model gradually transforms and starts to feel satisfying to look at.

Modeling the blade and handle follows a similar pipeline: I first build a dense mesh in Blender for smooth shapes, then DynaMesh it in ZBrush and stay on DynaMesh from there. The main goal here is not to lose the clean shape I already got from subdiv modeling in Blender. It was important for me not to over-complicate the model and to keep a good noise balance — not to overload it with detail.

So I actually simplified the blade's sculpt to balance out the visually busy "creature" on the scythe. After the final polish and adding small details like cracks and growths, the sculpting stage is done.

Retopology

I try to spend as little time as possible on retopology and mesh cleanup on my projects, since I'm not aiming for a perfect game-ready mesh meant for integration into a game, and mesh requirements can vary a lot from project to project anyway. So the option that speeds this stage up the most for me is Decimate in ZBrush: it massively speeds up what's normally a fairly tedious retopology process on complex meshes. That said, I do want to note that even this approach sometimes still requires some manual fussing with the model.

Once the mesh is done in ZBrush, I export everything back into Blender to start preparing the low-poly. The first thing to do is check for and fix artifacts left over from Decimate, like loose vertices or intersecting polygons. The 3D Print add-on is great for this — it lets you quickly spot every flaw in the mesh.

I prefer to place seams and unwrap the model in RizomUV: it lets you work with seams extremely fast, and it's also great for straightening islands.

Once the whole model is unwrapped, I export it into Blender and pack the UVs using the UVPackmaster add-on.

After naming the low-poly and high-poly meshes properly, I exported them into Marmoset for baking. For this model, I baked 4K textures, including Normal maps, AO, Curvature, position, and world-space Normal maps.

The result is a final low-poly model with all the baked maps, ready to be brought into Substance 3D Painter for texturing.

Texturing

Texturing for this piece was done entirely in Substance 3D Painter, in a stylized PBR style with hand-painted elements. My Substance 3D Painter pipeline usually starts with building the Base Color. SimpleDiffuse helps me a lot here: it lets me put together a base texture fairly quickly, one I can then refine further.

After building the base, I add Light generators to brighten/darken the upper and lower parts of the model, adding extra volume to the Base Color. No stylized piece is complete without a gradient, so I use the Position generator to add a different tint to the lower part of the model. After the gradient, I introduce color variety: I like using Glo grunge maps for this; they come in handy in all kinds of situations and give the model a more painterly look.

The next step is building Cavity and Convexity, which help further emphasize the model's volume. Here I try to make them more pronounced, since that comes in handy later, and I always combine them with grunges to "break up" the uniform Cavity/Convexity contours. The last generator in my Base Color stack for extra volume is AO, which can also be combined in interesting ways with various stylized grunges, filters like Blur Slope, or other generators.

Once the generator has built the base, I go over the spots that need extra work by hand: I add bright Convexity using the Overlay blend mode, and I lighten certain zones with a large soft brush, mimicking light and different color tints to add more color variety.

One really interesting addition in the recent versions of Substance 3D Painter is the Stylization filter, which I've lately been using to some degree in pretty much all of my work. The Hand Painted mode feels the most interesting to me visually: this filter gives its most interesting results on a highly contrasted Base Color, and it gets even better when combined with regular hand-painting, done in something like 3DCoat or in Substance 3D Painter itself.

After the Base Color is done, I use anchor points to build Roughness and Metallic off the diffuse map. It's a really cool way to add volume to the model, but again, it works best with a very contrasted, color-varied Base Color. At this same stage, I already set up a scene in Marmoset with a basic light source, because the result often looks different in Painter versus Marmoset Toolbag, and I need to check all the materials in the render engine right away: it has a strong effect on the final render Roughness and Metallic — even a Metallic or Roughness value that seems perfectly logical on paper can look off in the final render.

My last step is fine detailing: I add a Height map based on the Base Color, which gives the texture extra volume. I also add a Sharpen filter for more contrast in the texture, and HSL, which lets me do a final pass on the model's saturation and brightness.

Rendering

As I mentioned earlier, I build the render scene in Marmoset Toolbag. For rendering, I always use the same lighting setup: a key light, a fill light, two blue rim lights that light up the left side of the model, and one orange rim light for the right side.

My camera settings are pretty basic; the only things I tweak are color contrast and a bit of saturation. I always add Bloom and a touch of Sharpen too, and for this piece I decided to add a vignette around the edges for more visual variety in the background. For the organic part of the Scythe, I use a bit of SSS to give the model more volume and a sense of life.

I'd also like to give special thanks to Ilya Yakomaskin, who made the animation and brought this model to life — more details on it are on his ArtStation page. But to briefly walk through the process, it goes something like this: first you sketch out what kind of animation the model needs, which helps determine how to build the rig itself. Next, bones are roughed in, and controls are attached to them, making it easier to track deformations during the skinning stage.

Once the rig is ready, a simple idle is made (a cycle of repeated motion, most often breathing), on top of which an idle break is added for variety — this could be a yawn, a stretch, or any other motion that fits naturally into the overall loop.

Conclusion

Since this was a personal project for my portfolio and social media, I worked on it between commercial jobs, so it's hard to name an exact timeframe: sometimes I made fast progress, other times I'd set the model aside for weeks.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the main goals I set for myself on this project was to practice sculpting complex organic forms, and that's what ended up taking most of the time on the whole project. It was a really interesting exercise that pushed my skills forward. I also got the chance to practice stylized PBR hand-painting more, which I later leaned into even further on my latest project, The Snowowl Warden's Door — but that's a different story.

I want to say a huge thank you to my friends, who helped me stay on track and look at the results objectively throughout the whole process. And of course, a huge thanks to the 80 Level editors for giving me the honor of talking about the process behind making this scythe.

If you liked the model and want to keep up with my work, I'd love to have you follow me on my socials:

• Instagram
• Telegram
• Twitter/X
• LinkedIn
• ArtStation
• Also, make sure to check out the 3DNoLife Discord community

Artem Romanov, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford