Broadsword - Ice breaker

Thane-

My first sword for Chivalry. Minus the two prongs that look rather painful for the wielder, which i won't be putting in although i really like them. Its been very difficult to interpret the reference and im probably going to change this around a lot before im done.

Dylan Brady

good start, keep it up!
Based off the reference, I would say some the edges should be a bit harder. for example the crossguard looks to have a diamond/square profile in the reference, but in the model it looks more cylindrical.
Just a thought, keep going!

Thane-

I tried a different version, because the center sections seemed to protrude too much. Looked okay, sorta, but perhaps too different from real life swords. The artist, Aimee Mohrhauser (who is a pretty sweet artist btw, http://aimeeart5.blogspot.com/ who kindly gave permission to use it as a reference) drew the two sides of the center section between the crossguards slightly differently and I modeled the one side that looked like it protruded first. I sort of like the new version on the right more. Anyway on to putting the rest of it together

Thane-

EDIT: Answered my own question.

Thane-

Done with the high poly for the most part, although not 100% happy with it, just not sure where to go with it.

Dimensionally, i assume this works. I plan to raise the grip area just a bit to where the hand looks like it grabs the normal broadsword. But i assume the blade thickness is okay to be a bit thinner like it is?



Yikes, after modifying the shaft of the sword above the hilt, the whole thing is starting to look pretty fantasy looking. Chivalry devs, should i omit that part do you think and also maybe the bits jutting out on the sides? Im fine either way.

I plan to make the texturing pretty basic, one material for the shaft unlike the reference, only one or two metals for the whole sword, dark felt handle, no extravagant colors, subtle colors, no gems . Just dark felt and metal in various conditions. What do you think, or do i just need to submit something and find out later. Must be a little challenging to deal with curators me thinks :thumbdown: :thumbup: :poly122:

Thane-

Okay, big change to the handle, which i completely F'd up. It was almost my favorite part of the reference before i started and turned into the worst part of my model. But it looks much better now. So glad i figured this out.

Thane-

Some questions.

1. Can i have triangles in my LP?

2. Can i have floating geometry in the LP? (My handle grip pieces don't touch each other, for example)

3. I noticed the Chivalry broadsword doesn't have any faces on the edge of the sword, its just open. Is that to keep the normal creating black edges?

4. Is the width of my sword okay to be a broadsword skin?

5. I plan to raise the hilt up a little bit so the grip position is in the right place, this will raise the crossguard position up a little bit. Is that a problem? The blade ends will still terminate at the same point.

Thane-

Im done with the low poly and almost done with the UV mapping. Went with this version of the blade.

Thane-

I was getting tons of normal map issues in Max that i mostly fixed. I'm really hoping someone can help me here, i can't seem to figure out what is causing this. All of those lines are in the same UV island and have the same smoothing group. The vertices's are all correct, no doubled ones or anything.

Ramseus

Thane- wrote: »

Some questions.

1. Can i have triangles in my LP?

Yes. Everything is rendered in triangles in the end, so it doesn't matter as long as your silhouette and and normals look the way you want them to.

Thane- wrote: »

2. Can i have floating geometry in the LP? (My handle grip pieces don't touch each other, for example)

Yes. Float away!

Thane- wrote: »

3. I noticed the Chivalry broadsword doesn't have any faces on the edge of the sword, its just open. Is that to keep the normal creating black edges?

Wow, umm... that's weird... just pretend you never saw that. That's like that for no reason.


I can't see your recent images though. I see they're all google drive, they might not be public or something? You might want to open this thread up in an incognito window to double check what everyone else sees.

Thane-

Ah, good advice, i went over to the masturb...err the incognito window, and saw some images weren't showing up. I switched over to another photo sharing site. Hopefully that works better.

So on the last image, those creases are all in the same smoothing group and in the same UV island. That is the Substance Painter viewport with just a test material applied. I exported FBX with the smoothing group option and the split vertex option enabled.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

I'll will post the wireframe in just a sec.

Jerc

Your bake in 3dsMax probably uses a different tangent basis than Substance Painter, it's most likely the cause of all this triangulation you see in the viewport.
You should probably bake your normal map directly in Painter to avoid these artefacts.

Thane-

Baking in Substance Painter worked great. The issues are still there, but they are very minimal and wouldn't be seen at virtual arm's length.

I baked the map at 4096x4096, but im using 2048x512 for the diffuse and spec, which is also how i laid out the UV to paint with. Do i need to stretch the square normal map in photoshop to use with the 2048x512 map or does SP work with the two different sizes automatically?

Thane-

I dropped my laptop killing my main HD and i'm finally getting everything re-installed. Im living im my car right now to try and focus on becoming an artist so im limited to wifi-connections to re-download all my programs from Autodesk and Adobe, etc and its taken quite a while to get everything re-installed

Thane-

Well, i've finally found time to work on this again, although i've sorta given up on the idea of getting it into the game, but i would like to at least finish it. I've just started texturing it after getting the single master weapon material applied to the whole model for previewing.

Just one question if you can spare a few seconds to answer.

Assuming i've gone through the steps correctly, is what im seeing in the editor window what i'll basically see in the game, or can there be big differences?

Dylan Brady

what you see in editor is exactly what you see ingame, in terms of how the shader is setup and how your maps look.
However as lighting situations can dramatically affect the look of your model its best to look at it in multiple levels.

If you are having troubles with getting the model in the game feel free to PM me or email me with any questions. Really dont hesitate at all.

Thane-

Okay, awesome, will do. Thanks.

Thane-

BAM, DONE!!

Finally.... Man that took awhile but i finally got around to finishing it. There you go. Right there. Done. Harnessing the power of Substance Painter i was able to do what i wanted pretty quickly, just added a few fill layers and masks and there you go. This is the massive power of Substance Painter... right there..in that photo. Thanks to all for the help along the journey to reach the destination, this destination.



Will update tomorrow.

*Drops mike*

Thane-

Just kidding, heres the real one. Not 100% happy with it, but at my skill level the rate of progression and improvement is so slow that i think i better just leave it here. I still need to add some scratches via Substance Painter since i don't own Zbrush yet and im not happy with the blade body, too noisy and dark but not quite sure what to do there.

Edit: Btw, i just wanted to say that i really am a huge fan of Substance Painter, i put that joke sword together in just a few minutes, plus some time for not knowing that alphas had to have an alpha channel, thought they just went off of value. This was all photoshop on the real one.

Dylan Brady

LOL!
Looking great, bastian!
no seriously good work on the texturing.

Thane-

Just uploaded it to Steam with a basic photo, named Ice breaker. In the description i put "Forged in the snowy northern mountains, this broadsword has seen many battles". Not sure if claiming your games northern regions has snowy mountains somewhere in them is okay or not. I can't find a map and didn't think there was one, but if maybe i should amend it to another snowy region, perhaps from an existing map, let me know.

The only other concern i had was this quote from the workshop item guide listing how to market items: "Not crop key portions of the featured item(s)". Here is the pic, which has the whole blade too, but some cropped sections as well. Let me know if that is a problem. I plan to try and add more in-game pics when i figure out how to get them in.

Prime8

Strange, I cannot see any images after the ones posted 16th March, cannot see the workshop item either.

Thane-

That is weird, the're are 9 more pictures after the attached images from post 3. Do you see any images from photobucket, you know, like the images you see when the poster runs out of bandwidth on their account?


Steam is verifying my tax info. I went ahead and filled it out just in case it gets picked. Might take up to 48 hours they said.

Prime8

The issue is my browser, never experienced that before...

The blade itself looks a bit antique and dull, but if that's the look you want it's ok. I probably would prefer to fight with a well maintained, sharpened and polished weapon.

Thane-

Yeah its really unpolished/unmaintained near the hilt, its gets a bit cleaner as you progress upwards. Its a lot noisier than i originally intended too.

Thane-

In case this gets picked, i wanted to note that when i followed this part of the guide:

2.5 Now we need to create a Physics asset for our skeletal mesh, this ensures shadows get calculated accurately, it will improve the shadow quality and improve performance.
to create a simple physics asset, right click on the skeletal mesh of the weapon, and click create New Physics Asset. That's it!

..I got the result in the follow screen. I assume its fine, but i just couldn't imagine how a big box would help anything.

JO420

Just create it,save that package and leave it alone . If it needs editing I'm sure TB will take care of it.