World of Warcraft inspired weapon critique wanted

Serphantim

Hello everyone,

Last year i started posting on polycount with some own handpainted weapons and simply put they were shit :P I got some great advice from it however and after not having worked for a while i start again this year.

One of the things suggested was to recreate existing weapons and so i decided to recreate this weapon:



What i made of it is this:



If you have any spare time and are willing to give me feedback/advice it is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

LRoy

Looks really nice. I think the damage is a bit too uniform though, all the little cracks look stamped on. Some variety in length and size would help.

Gannon

Your painting is nice but you're missing a layer of details/contrast that show the age and stress that went into forging this might weapon.

Check some of the thickness of your shapes around the pommel and hilt.
Also you're missing bolts in some areas and have too many in others. One more thing, add bounce lighting.

Brian "Panda" Choi

IN regards to the sword detail, just imagine where the sword actually makes contact with other objects. That should localize the damage areas you're looking to paint in.

pmiller001

You need to look at the light detail. Your sword doesnt exactly show any depth. Whereas the reference does. Blizzards painters are masters at that kind of thing.

Dethling

The texture looks very flat and uniform.
Try to add more differences (hue, saturation and light). Also work on the lighting, at hand painted textures a lot of the real magic happens by painting the highlights and shadows.

I would suggest watching Tyson Murphys (Blizzard Lead Character Artist) hand painted weapon tutorial.
It helped me a lot.
It would also help collapsing all layers to one, made a copy of it, sharpen it via Ps filter and the put it on top of your layers with the multiply modifier and ~10-20% opaccity. This will pop up the colors and sharpen the edges without damaging the color-transistion (thanks to Jeff Parrot for this tip^^).

Serphantim

Thanks for all the advice guys put some more work in it today and these are the results:

Old:

New:

I also forgot to mentioned that i made the bright plasmalike stuff or whatever it is animated to give it a little extra:

wirrexx

Just becareful where you put youredge dmg. For ex. on the blade itself (the outside part) is where most of the dmg would aquire. but the inside, (closest to the plasma), why would there be dmg there?

Instead for dmg, do more dirt, dirt and mold useless likes to reside inside edges and small openings( or big) . that would make more sense.