A talented Ukrainian 3D artist has shared an in-depth breakdown of his impressive shader setup and rendering workflow in Blender for creating a realistic venomous tincture bottle inspired by Carpathian culture. Andriy Sopyliuk recently completed his latest artwork titled "Serpent Tincture," which tells the dark story of a bottle once owned by a 19th-century Carpathian outlaw who brewed deadly tinctures and collected the teeth of his victims.
Sopyliuk, a self-taught 3D artist from Ukraine, recently completed an intensive texturing course at Varto School, marking his first experience with a structured workshop. In his detailed breakdown, he focuses specifically on the technical aspects of rendering and post-processing rather than the creative concept or texturing process itself.
The project began with a 3D model created by his mentor, Dmytro Mykhailyk, who handled the modeling, sculpting, UVs, and baking. Sopyliuk's responsibility was to texture and render the piece. All students in the course worked with the same base model, but each created unique versions through their own textures and storytelling approaches. Multiple creative variations of this bottle have been published by other students on the Varto School ArtStation page.
Sopyliuk's main goal during the rendering stage was to achieve a realistic look while maintaining artistic control over the final result. He emphasizes that he's not an expert in nodes or rendering, and everything he shares comes from countless hours of trial and error.
For the environment scene setup in Blender, Sopyliuk started working on rendering alongside texturing to ensure organic blending between environment and textures. He parented all bottle objects to an empty, allowing experimentation with different prop positions and using keyframes to save location and rotation settings.
The lighting setup involved using Day Environment HDRI 050 from ambientCG as the environment background and base light. He created a custom node setup to separate the intensity of the visible background from the light that scatters on meshes, providing better control over separating the main object from the background and making the bottle's silhouette stand out more clearly.
For shadows, Sopyliuk used two Sun lights to create soft-edged shadows with a warm tint. The main light casts sharp shadows with a narrow angle of 0.15 degrees and a color temperature of 6000K, while the second sun has a wider angle of 1 degree and a temperature of 4500K to soften shadows and add warmth. The second sun is parented to the first so they share the same location and rotation.
Tree models created the shadows, with varying distances between leaves and ground producing both sharp and soft shadows, mimicking real-life effects under trees. Leaves are also visible in the background, adding depth to the HDRI and creating nice bokeh with light interaction.
For the floor, Sopyliuk used a barrel model from Quixel Megascans but needed sharper textures for close-up shots. He separated the top part of the barrel, repacked the UVs, and baked textures from the original model using Marmoset Toolbag. The textures looked sharper after baking, and he enhanced them further in Substance 3D Painter.
Small environmental details like debris, leaves, pine needles, branches, and spider webs all contribute to a more natural and believable forest scene. Sopyliuk experimented extensively with different lighting setups, HDRIs, and scene assets, trying alternatives like rocks or tree stumps instead of the barrel.
The studio scene setup was more basic, using studio HDRI as the main light source with additional tweaks. Multiply Mix nodes added depth by increasing glossy strength and adding a blue tint. The visible floor was a simple plane with a smooth bend, and he added a ceiling to create more shadows and prevent the background from looking plain white.
Sopyliuk's shader settings showcase advanced techniques across multiple materials. For fabric, he created a rim effect directly in the shader using an Emission shader with albedo as its color, mixing it with fabric textures and using a Fresnel mask to control visibility, emphasizing the silhouette without adding actual rim light to the scene.
The paper shader accounts for light transmission through the material. Rather than simply mixing Principled BSDF with Translucent BSDF, he applied the effect only to edges for more artistic control, avoiding blurring of fine details like text. He used a combination of Vector Math node set to Dot Product and a Bevel node to isolate edges, mixing the result with albedo texture to preserve brightest surface details.
For minerals, the complex node setup started by mixing Glass BSDF and Refraction BSDF, connecting the Roughness input and adjusting albedo brightness and saturation. He added subtle rim light effects and dust using a black and white mask created in Substance 3D Painter. The shader includes colored shadows, which while possible in Blender, render extremely slowly, so he used additional nodes to simulate the effect more efficiently. Volume inside the minerals adds extra depth.
The glass shader begins with Glass BSDF and Refraction BSDF mix, using a separate Glass node for backfaces to reduce normal map artifacts. He added rim light effects using Emission and mixed everything with Principled BSDF to remove the glass shader in dust-covered areas. For the dust mask, he used the glass albedo itself, since dusty areas appear darker, clamping values to isolate them.
Sopyliuk also experimented with transparent shadows setup, which worked well as a fake glass shadow test by eliminating internal glass shadows while keeping the outer contour, mimicking real glass behavior without caustics complexity.
For rope material, he created small fibers and loose threads using Blender's Quick Fur tool, refining results with Trim, Set Hair Curve Profile, Interpolate, Noise, Frizz, and Shrinkwrap modifiers. The material used a mix of Transparent BSDF and Hair BSDF with rope-matching colors, making the material feel more tactile and believable in close-ups.
Drawing from his photography hobby, Sopyliuk wanted more realistic lens controls in 3D. He discovered the Lens Sim add-on for Blender, which offers fully customizable lens settings, chromatic aberration, vignetting, distortion, and lens softness. For environment renders, he used the Helios-44 preset, a lens he owns in real life. He added lens dirt, small amounts of bloom and glare to introduce subtle imperfections.
To showcase textures without chromatic aberration blurriness while maintaining the effect, he rendered two separate versions of each shot - one with chromatic aberration enabled and one without, combining them later in post-processing.
Render settings varied by shot but typically started with specific configurations he outlined. He lowered Noise Threshold to 0.025 for more detail or reduced noise, and could increase samples to 1000 for shots containing small parts requiring more samples. For chromatic aberration renders, 0.1 Noise Threshold and 200 samples sufficed, with Fast GI Approximation enabled for speed.
In Light Paths, he set Diffuse and Glossy bounces to 3-4, with Volume bounces at 3 for proper depth and lighting in mineral shaders. Indirect Light clamping at 15 preserved more highlight information while potentially introducing more fireflies. He reduced Pixel Filter Width to 0.7 for sharper renders and exported both Noisy and Denoised versions in TIFF format, plus black and white Cryptomatte masks for key elements.
Post-processing in Photoshop involved mixing noisy and denoised images, adding chromatic aberration, slight temperature and calibration adjustments using Camera Raw, adding sharpness, minor color tweaks with Color Balance and Color Lookup for consistency across shots, and adding grain. He relies heavily on Smart Filters for greater layer control.
For denoising, he placed the denoised image on top of the noisy one at about 80% opacity, using masks to selectively remove denoising effects where too strong and blurry. For chromatic aberration, he duplicated the layer and grouped both copies at 80% group opacity, with the first layer's blending mode set to Color and the second using Luminosity at 20% opacity.
Basic color calibration through Camera Raw adjusted temperature and fine-tuned color calibration, as his foliage-heavy scenes tend to look too green. For sharpness, he prefers the High Pass method over Camera Raw or Sharpen filter because it offers easy control over opacity, blending mode, and radius adjustment with Smart Filters.
He typically uses three sharpness layers at around 70% opacity: radius 1 affecting the entire image, radius 3 with masking for main object edges and emphasis areas, and radius 7-15 for specific details like minerals, metal wires, wood carvings, and fabric/paper edges.
Masks dramatically change render appearance by separating main objects from backgrounds and adding depth through selective brightness adjustments. His favorite technique uses Curves adjustment layers, tweaking only the middle curve section and painting layer masks to control application areas.
Final color correction uses Color Balance layers and Color Lookup adjustment set to Drop Blues at low opacity. A final Color Balance layer matches all renders together, ensuring consistency across different sun and HDRI positions by opening all renders simultaneously in tiled Photoshop windows.
Grain addition is crucial - not render software noise, but camera-like grain that every real camera introduces. He starts with 50% gray fill layer, adds grain using Camera Raw, duplicates with different Size and Roughness settings, and blends layers using grunge texture for uneven grain patterns in Overlay mode.
Analyzing real photos revealed grain prominence in shadows versus highlights, so he duplicated the grain layer again, changed blending to Soft Light, and masked shadow areas using Color Range selection with Shadows setting and controlled smoothness through Fuzziness slider.
Sopyliuk concludes by noting many details were omitted for article brevity but hopes to provide clear insight into his approach and techniques. He uploaded original images to Google Drive including full-quality render comparisons between raw Blender renders and final edited versions.
The project provided great opportunity to explore texturing and rendering techniques on a shared 3D model that many talented artists worked on. He encourages checking out their unique texture variations and creative approaches on the Varto School ArtStation page.
While focusing on art and techniques, Sopyliuk acknowledges Ukraine's ongoing war situation, encouraging support through donations or solidarity, as every bit of support makes a difference. He hopes the article inspires others in their creative journeys while emphasizing the importance of staying safe and continuing to create.
