Demon Edge

TinaGrillo

Hi, I'm Tina and I'm currently working on the Demon Edge - a sword from the Dota 2 universe.

Reference:


EDIT (progress):
This project is for a class I'm working on so for this week I'm focusing on finishing the high poly model.  Here is the 'finished' mesh (Zbrush render):


Some callouts/other shots:

TinaGrillo

Made some progress on a few things.  I changed the proportions on the skull for my grip (pommel?).


My first pass/attempt at trying to sculpt out the details of this particular part of the blade.  I think I'm mostly happy with the shapes - so I'm going to go ahead and clean everything up so it doesn't look so.. mushy.

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TinaGrillo

Made some adjustments to the wrapping, as mentioned!  I also gave the skull (pommel) its second pass as well as the blade detail.  I'm still pretty new to Zbrush so I'm having somewhat of a hard time trying to get that part as clean looking as possible.  Going to keep at it, though.

Spoon

Uh, a demon edge! This will be interesting

C86G

Oooooh, that looks familiar!
I made one too yome years ago. It is a very fun model to work on : )

Edit: just noticed I still use prt of it as my user pic here : D

TinaGrillo

Oh, hey! I saw your take on it looking for references and I loved yours!  I had no idea what you did to get those details in the sword in, because I liked your approach.  So I just tried sculpting them in Not sure how effective/efficient that is but oh well, I'm still learning!

C86G

You mean the "polygonal" details ont the actual blade? Well, I simply polymodeled them ^^

TinaGrillo

It's been a while, but right now I've been working on creating my low polys:

I'm hoping to have these done and baked very soon!  

TinaGrillo

Got my low poly done and baked out!


I'm pretty happy with how the normals turned out The wrapping could be a bit more defined, so I'm thinking I'll go tweak the high poly yet again.  I keep making changes that are so subtle that it barely looks like I changed anything.

But other than that, I think the bake turned out really nice!  Going to tweak some things and then get right to texturing.

Bek

One thing I notice looking at the lowpoly wireframe, is you have lots of geo on the handle (which has a fairly subtle silhouette) compared to the large curves of the blade. It just seems out of proportion. If you can spend that much on the handle, why not add some extra edges in to help out the blade — not that it's particularly polygonal at the moment, but relative geometry use is good to keep in mind.

Also, unless you have a specific reason not to, you should be adding edge padding / dilation to your baked maps.

TinaGrillo

Bek said:

One thing I notice looking at the lowpoly wireframe, is you have lots of geo on the handle (which has a fairly subtle silhouette) compared to the large curves of the blade. It just seems out of proportion. If you can spend that much on the handle, why not add some extra edges in to help out the blade — not that it's particularly polygonal at the moment, but relative geometry use is good to keep in mind.

Also, unless you have a specific reason not to, you should be adding edge padding / dilation to your baked maps.

You're right, that is kind of an issue.  Unfortunately, there's not as much time left I can spend on that phase.  So, I will try my best to address your points, but the bulk of my focus has to be directed towards texturing now :[  
Adding in some edges to the blade, like you suggested, doesn't seem like it'd disrupt anything that much, so I can try to do that.  Beyond that, though, there's not much I can do at this point - but I've noted your points.

As for the padding, it was set to 2 for these maps.  I've been told different things in terms of what padding to use, so is 2 generally way too low?  Is that a value you use for just simple props?  I put in 2 simply because I was following an xnormal tutorial, there wasn't much explanation on it.

TinaGrillo

Here's my first pass on my textures.  I'm going for obsidian/hot iron materials.


Also, I have to admit that I did not make changes to my geometry, sorry :[ I was misinformed on the due date of this project so I poured all of my attention into the materials.  

Edit: I see the renders look a little funky, if anyone has any insight on that, feel free to share.  There's banding and weird dots going o_o  Not sure how to get rid of those.

CrazyMoon

Oohhh I like this! Will the sword have an emissive as well? To really make it glow :> 

C86G

Nice : )

TinaGrillo

CrazyMoon said:

Oohhh I like this! Will the sword have an emissive as well? To really make it glow :> 

I do have an emissive map, but I plugged it into the heat map slot in marmo.  I thought it gave off a better 'hot iron' look that I was going for.  I have no idea how heat maps work or how they're supposed to look, but it was a happy accident that I just left in.  I also died down the bloom/glow I had for it thinking it may have been too flashy, so I can turn those up again if you think that's what it's missing!

Although the project was TECHNICALLY due the day I posted this, it's final due date is at the end of the semester.  So I will be working on this alongside our current project.  Which means way less updates, but I will show a comparison of the emissive map plugged in as an emissive and heat map in marmo.  I wish I could have both effects at once!  

EDIT
Here's the comparison:

Far left is nothing plugged in for emissive or heat. Middle is my emissive map plugged into the emissive slot in m armo (max intensity), far right is my emissive map plugged into the heat map (max intensity + @50% temperature).
For me personally, as I was working with my emissive, I just couldnt get it to do exactly what I wanted.  The glow felt too.. uniform?  When I plugged it into the heat map slot, however, I noticed it was working way better with my gloss, metalness, and ao maps, so it felt like the better choice to me at the time.
Let me know what you think! I personally like the glow from the emissive, but I didn't choose it because I felt like I was just losing other detail with that option as if it was a map working independently rather than pulling from my other maps like the heat slot does.

CrazyMoon

Yeah I agree fully! I also tend to put my emissive map in as heat in Marmo, it really adds a better look to it. I really dig the far right one!! I think it could've just been the missing the bloom/glow... Just adds that heat I'm looking for I guess. Thanks for showing the comparison And good job!!