Mat & Mut: Sculpting a Candle-Humanoid and Its Companion for a Contest
Aysu Hoşcan talked about the Melted Time project, explaining how the idea started and how she sculpted the melting character with the intention of showing the passing of time.
Introduction
Hi everyone! I'm Aysu Hoscan, a self-taught 3D Artist focusing on stylized PBR and hand-painted textures. I actually started 3D art in a pretty spontaneous way. One day, my friends asked, "Wanna make a game?" and suddenly I found myself exploring this world. Before that, I worked as a veterinary
technician.
Some of you may know me from my previous Wayfinder-Inspired Scythe article. Since then, I've completed four more personal projects, most of them centered around improving my painterly PBR workflow and developing my stylized sculpting skills. I have a strong passion for stylized game art.
Even though my portfolio is mostly filled with fan art weapons, I'm working toward becoming an environment artist. Right now, I'm creating an Arcane-inspired diorama for my portfolio. Most of the progress I've made so far comes from steady practice, discipline, staying curious, and my ongoing desire to learn.
I've been in the industry for about a year, and professionally, I mostly work on realistic and semi-realistic props and weapons. Even though this work isn't stylized, it has given me a solid technical foundation that I carry into my personal stylized projects.
Melted Time Project
When I saw the concept for The Rookies' Meet Mat challenge, I got excited, and a few ideas started to form in my mind. Six days before the deadline, I decided to join the competition. The emotions I wanted to express were clear to me: the marks that time leaves behind, sacrifice, and showing two different emotional layers within the same story.
As these thoughts became clearer, the image of a candle began to take shape, because a candle is one of the simplest and most visible symbols of the continuity of time. This is how the story of Mat and Mut began. Time often leaves traces that go unnoticed.
This has been a theme I have wanted to bring into my work for a long time. I imagined Mat as a candle that had been burning for a long time, tired of lighting the darkness alone and quietly wishing for a companion. That wish is answered when a small figure, Mut, forms from Mat's melting wax.
Mut is a part of Mat, just as the future is shaped by the traces left by the past. Mat gives a part of his flame to Mut, giving him life. While Mut's fresh flame represents a new beginning, Mat's melting form becomes the last light carried from the past into the future.
On the technical side, I tried to create a surface language that supports this emotion by combining stylized sculpting with a painterly PBR approach. I emphasized the texture of the wax, the flow of the drips, the way the flame melts the chest area, and the extinguished wick.
All of these details were intended to create an organic feeling and make the metaphor of time easier to read. Melted Time became an emotional and visually layered piece that brings together the traces of time on Mat and the light born with Mut in a single narrative. Through these two characters, I wanted to show how the constant flow of time brings the past and the future together in the same scene.
Sculpting
I followed a workflow that was a little different from the flow in my other projects. I first started the modeling stage with organic sculpting in ZBrush. Creating the main shape with a low polygon count in the first stage always speeds up the process.
I began with the large details. In sculpting, working from great details to small ones helps avoid confusion and makes it easier to create a clean model. I used the same approach in this project as well.
Giving life to the characters and expressing a specific emotion requires a very intense thought process. In moments like this, time feels as if it stops, and everything needs to follow a certain flow. With this approach in mind, I sculpted the character on the left as the deformation of a candle that has been burning for a long time, influenced by time, melting, and leaving traces behind.
I created most of the flow effect using the "Cue Buildup" brush. I used this brush throughout most of the sculpt because it gives a cleaner, more organic, and more effective result than the regular ClayBuildup brush. I also used the "Folly Hair" brush to create a more controlled flow in the wax buildup. This brush was especially helpful for keeping the shapes of the wax piles and achieving a natural residue effect.
The stylization of the wax drips and candle details was quite critical in this piece. I wanted the drips to feel affected by gravity, since capturing that would give the work a much stronger sense of direction. With that in mind, I masked and extracted some of the drips, added thickness using Dynamic Subdiv, and then cleaned them up with ZRemesher to establish the final shape.
After that, I merged everything back together and polished it. For some of the other drips, I built up their forms manually, focusing on keeping a clean, stylized flow. During this detailing stage, the Inflate brush was especially helpful for giving more fullness to the base areas of each drip.
I started the flame and smoke by using a sphere. After shaping the main form of the flame with the "SnakeHook" brush in the first stage, I slowly increased the polygon count and added the flame details. This part of the process was very enjoyable. I also used Fred Taylor's Stylized Ropes IMM Brushes pack for the rope I used as the candle wick on the character.
Topology and UVs
Just as topology is important for low-poly, it also plays a significant role in high-poly sculpting. Creating a clean and readable sculpt is an important step. To achieve a clean topology in the high poly, I used the "ZRemesher Project" method in ZBrush.
For the low-poly, since this model was a concept piece, I did not focus too much on polygon count. To speed up the process, I used the "Quad Remesher" add-on. Additionally, I used the "Reshape Island" tool from the ZenUV add-on to refine certain areas in the UVs. While unwrapping, I ensured seams were placed in minimally visible areas.
The organic nature of the model required manually placing the seams, which took some time. I created the UVs in three separate material sets and packed them using UVPackmaster, resulting in three UV islands. Since this project was created as a stylized presentation piece rather than a game-ready asset, I did not perform a full manual retopology.
I only used the amount of geometry needed to support clean shapes and a smooth bake. The mesh density was a deliberate artistic choice rather than an optimization requirement. Lastly, I baked the model in Substance 3D Painter.
Texturing Workflow
During the texturing process in Substance 3D Painter, I employed an unusual technique to give the model a painted, emotionally expressive illustration look. Blending both hand-painted and PBR approaches was sometimes challenging and required careful fine-tuning.
I created the base color in Substance 3D Painter using the "Simple Diffuse" material from Nhance School, which is specifically designed for hand-painted workflows and helped me establish a quick, clean base.
For the first color variations, I used the Thickness Map. The thickness map shows the inner thickness of the model, and using it as a mask for the color transitions between the inner and outer layers of the wax was very effective. I created the main tone of the model by applying colors from different angles through the Light Generator.
For the roughness variations, I kept the roughness lower at the bottom parts of the drips and higher on the other areas to strengthen the "melted" feeling. The roughness details were very important to show that the model was not only hand-painted but also supported by physical material behavior.
The Emissive and SSS (Subsurface Scattering) layers helped enhance the organic appearance of the model and achieve a believable candle effect. This was the most challenging and experimental part of the process. When painting the SSS and emissive, it was crucial to determine where the wax was thinner and where it remained thicker.
I applied stronger, more colorful emissive and SSS on the thinner areas, and a softer, more muted approach on the thicker parts to maintain the candle effect. Additionally, I added emissive tones considering the influence of the candle flame. SSS details were primarily applied to the thinner areas, such as the tips of drips and finer surfaces of the wax.
The tools in Substance 3D Painter, which are both very useful and enjoyable to work with, helped me achieve the painterly look I wanted. Fine-tuning them was challenging but also fun. The two tools I used the most were the "Stylization" filter and the "MatFX OilPaint" filter.
I used displacement to create a stronger sense of depth in the eyes.
I wanted the inner structure of the wick to be visible through Mat's chest, just like in a real candle. This detail made the form feel more naturally cohesive.
Rendering in Substance 3D Painter
I completed the rendering process in Substance 3D Painter. Since I hadn't used the Iray render engine in Painter before, I tried many iterations during the render stage. As the light source, I used one of Substance 3D Painter's default HDRIs called "techies_metal_cube." This map created a very soft lighting setup. Very fine adjustments were needed for the SSS and emissives to appear correctly in the render.
When I started the project, the first part that challenged me the most was the concept stage. Even though the ideas began to form in my mind, turning these thoughts into a meaningful and consistent concept took time. Then, creating a very organic and flowing candle sculpt in ZBrush was another challenge.
However, thanks to the brush sets I used, I was able to move through this stage in a more controlled way and without losing time. Since the painterly effect is one of my favorite stylization techniques, I wanted to push it one step further in this project. Making the wax surface transitions, melt marks, and small color variations feel hand-painted was both enjoyable and demanding.
The last major challenge was the rendering part. In my previous works, I usually take my renders in Marmoset Toolbag, but for the Meet Mat 5 contest, I had to take all renders inside Substance 3D Painter. I tried many iterations to find the right HDRI, adjust the SSS settings, and make the light behave correctly on the wax.
Finding the right balance was the most critical point of this stage. Even though the time was limited, the process taught me to make quick decisions, remove unnecessary steps, and set the right priorities. There were some techniques I wanted to try, but there wasn't enough time. Still, this pushed me to focus on producing the best result with the conditions I had and to think more strategically.
This project gave me a new perspective, both technically and creatively. It also opened space in my portfolio for a more personal work that reflects my own story and interpretation, and that was the most valuable part of the process for me. My advice for beginners is to be patient and not hesitate to experiment a lot. You realize over time how much small steps can lead to big improvement.
Sharing your work with communities speeds up your progress and increases motivation. Feedback from others often shows details you might not notice on your own. And most importantly, never stop trying; everything you keep working on will take you to the next level.
Sharing this project and its process, and being featured on this platform for the second time, was truly enjoyable. I would like to sincerely thank the 80 Level team and Emma Collins for this opportunity. I regularly share my WIP stages and 3D tips on my social media, so feel free to follow me there as well.
