PBR Dagger. Following a concept with a dash of improv

Trevor

Been working on a side project while I finish up an environment. I wanted to follow a concept this time so I found this dagger concept by William McAusland. I havent done much in the way of weapons and I found this to be a nice start and good practice with PBR metal. I am aware of the seams but I would like to get the materials down before I fix texture seams. Rendered in Marmoset 2.

Im looking for C&C of all types. Help me get better Polycount. I need your collective wisdom.


Concept



Dagger



Flats

Joltya

The wear seems a bit over done in some areas. Also the scratches are small and it makes the blade seem huge in comparison. Also, you got some weird anti-aliasing on the bottom of the blade.

Were you using a metal map? If so, I'd include it in your flats so we can know what type of workflow you're using.

Trevor

Thanks for catching my mistake Joltya. Updated flats to include metalness. I honestly have no idea how to remove that anti-aliasing. I have tried adjusting the High poly and rebaking over a dozen times.

Trevor

Update!

Finally got the white edges on the blade to disappear. The problem was my low poly geometry verts were slightly off center at the blades edge and were not in line with the high poly blade edge. A big thank you to Rollin, Earthquake and everyone else who posted for helping me figure out the problem.
I Brought down the albedo and roughness grunge all around then removed some of the scratches on the concave portion of the blade. I added another light to catch some detail and bring out the form on the guard and spread out the distribution of the main light to grab some more detail on the blade.
Im pretty happy with the metal right now. I may end up bringing down the grunge on the blade some more.
Even though its not on the concept I may add a little detail in the form of some groves and patterns somewhere on the dagger to make it stand out a bit more.

Joltya

Looking a lot better! You may want to try adding some knicks into the normal map of the blade to really show some use.

I feel like the wood could be a little more red and saturated, to really separate it from the blade, but that's just a personal preference. I feel like the wood is getting there, but it still feels slightly off.

EarthQuake

Hey, this is looking pretty good, my biggest issue here is the blade material. It looks like you have a lot of variance in the spec map but very little in the gloss. Most of the detail for a material like this will come from the gloss map, while the spec should be fairly even.



The interesting detail and variation there is all in how smooth/polished the surface is, which is defined by the gloss/roughness map.

Swarm22

It looks like you're using galvanized metal for the blade and blades aren't made from that kind of metal.

Trevor

Update!

Really toned down the gunge in an effort to make the blade look cleaner and better kept. Saturated, darkened, and hue shifted the wood to make it stand out more (thanks Joltya). Added some more normal detail to the wood and the blade.