I have always been a huge proponent of stylized art, be it traditional pen and paper sketching or digital art. Creating stylized 3D illustrations is now one of my hobbies. As a game artist, I wanted to explore different ways to create game art focusing on the niche of stylized art.

Stylized potion

Here, I will be breaking down how I created some magical potions for a fantasy game. The basics boil down to:

  1. Modeling the potions.
  2. Texturing the models (mostly using shader nodes).

Let’s start making some magical potions!

Modeling:

  1. I started with a Roundcube and extruded the top four faces to create the neck of the potion bottle.
Modeling the potion bottle

2. For the liquid, I duplicated the lower half of the bottle and played around with the vertices to get the liquid shape.

Modeling the potion liquid
Making the liquid

3. For the twine rope holding the tag, I used the Bezier curve. Then added the knots by modifying some cylinders.

Making the rope with bezier curve

4. For the cork, I duplicated the faces along the neck of the bottle and modified the shape.

Making the cork/ stopper

That was pretty much everything I used to make the model for the potion.

Moving on to adding the materials. For the cork and the rope, I used simple materials with base color variation and only played around with the Roughness value.

💡
Quick Tip: It's better to set up the lighting before adding materials to the objects. It will make the render preview more accurate.

Glass:

For the glass material, I combined a Glass shader and a Transparent shader with a Mix-Shader node, to get the glass material.

Shader for glass material

To get the refraction effect for the glass, you can change the settings of the material.

Refraction settings for glass

Liquid:

For the liquid material, I basically used an Emission shader and a Translucent shader. For the gradient of the liquid, I texture mapped the liquid object with texture coordinate and mapping nodes. Then used the ColorRamp node on the Translucent shader to create the gradient. I duplicated the same ColorRamp to add to the color node of the emission shader.

Shader nodes for liquid

After adding the materials, the grey blobs finally start to look like a magical potion.

Material preview

With some lighting additions and some quick hearts, the final render looked like this:

Final render

There we have it, a stylized potion for a game! Using the same materials, different variations of the bottle and the liquid can be made.

Thanks for reading. Catch you in the next one!