[WIP] Medieval War Arrow

Ithronyar

This is part of a project I've been working on, with the goal of producing a wide variety of realistic arrow models. I might post it sometime in the future, when it's ready for review.

For now, this is the first arrow. It has a socketed iron broadhead and reasonably accurate medieval-style construction.

Even though it's technically WIP, I consider it nearly finished except for some minor details. Thus, I decided it was time to post it for review.

The whole arrow:


Arrowhead:


Fletchings:


Now for some technical details. The materials are PBR. The metal is basically a variety of generic tiling textures that have been blended using a series of one-channel mask textures (smooth metal, rough metal, oxidation, etc.). This is all to minimize filesize and make editing the textures easy and modular.

The wood and fletching materials are much less complex. They're still PBR, but they just have some albedo, color blending, and bump mapping.

The fletchings have some limited rigging so they can deform. You can see this in the images, since the fletchings would normally clip into the floor.

UPDATES

Fletchings:


Breakdown: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2581633/#Comment_2581633

New arrowhead material:


Low-poly versions:


Quick UE4 test:

Ithronyar

A little update: Revised the fletchings, since they looked pretty bad. They weren't made to be viewed so closely, but their quality still bothered me.

A new normal map, higher-res alpha map, and revised albedo worked wonders.

aclund3

The metal on the arrow head isn't reading quite right to me.  Its got this blurry/painted quality... I'd try to go a little more towards this direction, with some more roughtness varation and usage damage:



On the other hand, I really like the string/rope work that you've done. Would you care to share how you achieved it? Maybe a wireframe would be cool to see

Ithronyar

You're right about the metal: Its textures were just masked in at a low resolution, since they were initially just going to be baked down to realtime-friendly assets.

Here's a little revision. I'll probably improve it some more in the future, but that's for another time.


On to the fletchings and string. Most of it is pretty basic, mesh-wise.

The binding ring is a hollow cylinder that's been tweaked to look like it's wrapped around the fletchings.



I'm sure that's no surprise, though. You're probably more interested in that helical binding along the length of the fletchings.

It started as a tiny  triangular prism (i.e. a 3-sided cylinder), which I manually extruded and adjusted to make it look wrapped around the fletchings.



After it looped once, I dynamically tiled it until it reached the other binding ring. There was no clever method behind getting the verts to tile; just a lot of manual adjusting and scrutiny.



Once the edges were contoured and the tiled verts matched up, I adjusted the UVs to remove the texture seam, since the texture is tileable.

Ithronyar

Update: I remade the arrowhead material. It's a lot more physically accurate now, so it doesn't look as weird.



I also made low-poly meshes and realtime-friendly materials.


And just for the sake of testing, here it is in Unreal Engine 4.

It's not perfect, but for such a small model, it only needs a few tweaks and a little more texture to look good.