Viking Axe

Rizal_Suhaimi

With the new Assassin's Creed game coming out, the Game Dev Society from my university challenged us to create anything with a Viking theme. I decided to create a game-ready Viking axe.

Rizal_Suhaimi

I actually had a lot of reference pics but I'm not sure if I could post them here without getting into trouble. I did, however,  get permission from Erick Altensleben to use his Viking Axe concept art. Below is my main reference image for creating the base 3D model in 3DS Max.

Rizal_Suhaimi

Here are some pictures of my base high-poly axe model to be taken into ZBrush

Rizal_Suhaimi

This is my plan for the axe

Rizal_Suhaimi

Zbrush is fairly new to me so it was really challenging to sculpt the axe.

For the grip, I used the layers function in ZBrush because it allowed me to make some changes in the later stages. I started by adding some surface noise to make the grains you normally see on some types of leather. I'm not sure if this was the right move because I'm aware that for purposes like a grip, it may make more sense to have a smoother leather. If I had gone for the smoother option, then I would do the major part of creating the leather material in Substance Painter. The problem was that Substance Painter is also fairly new to me, so I just went with what I felt like doing.
After adding the initial noise, I sculpted the worn-out edges of the leather grip. Finally, I added another layer of surface noise to create tiny holes and marks. I plan to only add scratches in Painter because it's a lot easier to control that way.

Please let me know what you think about my leather grip.

I could use some critique on my wood sculpt

What I understand from baking is that it is usually best to make sure that with any change in height level on the model, there is also a visible slope/chamfer connecting the different height levels. So, that is what I made sure of when I sculped the engraved patterns. I made an alpha of the engraved patterns with Photoshop and used it in ZBrush as a starting point.
After that, sculpted some dents around the iron parts and some scratches near the sharp edge. I tried not to do this so excessively in ZBrush because it may be difficult to handle in Painter.




The final high-poly model has about 3 million polygons.

Rizal_Suhaimi

I just realised that there shouldn't have been dents that deep on the part of the iron core that is facing the back of the bladed part

Rizal_Suhaimi

I'm not going to correct the mistake I mentioned earlier because this project took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Anyway, this is the low-poly model with 2566 polygons:

Here is the UV unwrap:

I don't think it's necessary to arrange the UV islands neatly because I'm going to paint the textures/materials in Painter but let me know if I'm wrong about this.

MattCane

Hey! Looking good so far however it is quite high-poly and i would look at optimising some geo. If you are going to paint the textures and materials in Painter then i would definately make sure you have nice straight UV's where possible so that it is easier to get details on to your mesh! There are a lot of islands that can be straightened to make it easier when it comes round to texturing. 

The area highlighted above can definatley get optimised as the sides or the axe are rather flat which means you don't need the geometry there!  

Hope this helps! The rest of it looks real good!  

Rizal_Suhaimi

MattCane said:

Hey! Looking good so far however it is quite high-poly and i would look at optimising some geo. If you are going to paint the textures and materials in Painter then i would definately make sure you have nice straight UV's where possible so that it is easier to get details on to your mesh! There are a lot of islands that can be straightened to make it easier when it comes round to texturing. 

The area highlighted above can definatley get optimised as the sides or the axe are rather flat which means you don't need the geometry there!  

Hope this helps! The rest of it looks real good!  

Hi Matt. Thank you for your feedback.

I forgot to check and post on this forum. I'm sorry about that. I'll post the progress in a sec.

I have actually entered the texturing phase. I think I'm spending too much time on this project, so I think I should try to wrap it up by the end of this week. Therefore, I don't think I can apply your advice for this project but I'll be sure to keep it in mind for future projects. Regarding your advice, when it comes to assets like this, should I just try to use as little polygons as possible and quickly test bake in substance or is there like a typical amount of polygons I should aim for?

Rizal_Suhaimi

There were quite a lot of errors when I did the baking in Painter. One of them was that the sharp edge looked broken because I wasn't careful enough when sculpting the scratches in ZBrush. So I went back to a ZBrush file copy without the scratches and took it from there. While I was there I decided to also fix the illogically placed dents I mentioned before.



I'm just going to try painting the scratches in Substance Painter

Rizal_Suhaimi

I also had to change the UV unwrap layout because there was a baking error on the back of the axe.


I suppose next time, I'll think about how I can straighten more UV islands.

Rizal_Suhaimi

The bake turned out quite well in Painter. My texture sets are only going to have a 2K resolution since that was what I was taught to use in my first year of university.





There was however an issue with the grip bake. I can't fix it for this project but next time I do a project involving grips, I'll need to make sure that I leave no gaps between the layers of mesh.

Rizal_Suhaimi

This is what the metal looks like so far. I'll be trying to add some deeper scratches soon

An_Unclean_Hippy

For the actual blade of the axe, to increase texile density, I would've mirrored the blade. If you have the same design, and it's symmetrical, it's almost always better to just mirror for an increased pixel count, especially for a hero asset like this.

Having neat islands is also an important thing to be doing even if using painter, so that you can always get the most detail out of your maps as possible. It just makes your asset look even better. Texturing truly starts at the UV stage.

I'd also recommend using a coloured checkerboard over monochrome. It's personal preference, but I just find it makes seeing distortion and other UV artifacts easier for me. You can find 4k checkerboards online as well.

Rizal_Suhaimi

An_Unclean_Hippy said:

For the actual blade of the axe, to increase texile density, I would've mirrored the blade. If you have the same design, and it's symmetrical, it's almost always better to just mirror for an increased pixel count, especially for a hero asset like this.

Having neat islands is also an important thing to be doing even if using painter, so that you can always get the most detail out of your maps as possible. It just makes your asset look even better. Texturing truly starts at the UV stage.

I'd also recommend using a coloured checkerboard over monochrome. It's personal preference, but I just find it makes seeing distortion and other UV artifacts easier for me. You can find 4k checkerboards online as well.

Hi there. Thank you for your feedback.

I did consider mirroring the to sides of the blade but there was a baking error. I actually want the edge where the side transitions into the back of the blade to be seen as a soft edge instead of a sharp edge as seen below

This meant that I had to make the set of polygons as circled below as sort of 1 smoothing group. This then meant that I can't separate the UV islands to symmetry the two sides of the blade because it would lead to a baking error at the edge pointed in the picture above. (I didn't take a picture of the error). So that was why I resorted to making the two sides of the blade non-symmetrical.

However, making the whole thing have one smoothing group caused another baking error at the sharp edge pointed below:

So the way I fixed it was having the following smoothing group plan:

Note: SG = Smoothing group

Regarding having neat UVs, I'll take your advice the next time I make an asset like this. I will make sure the grips have straight UVs and just manually fix any distortions by eye instead of relying on the relax tool. I just need to get this completed and move on to other projects because I've heard that it could be detrimental for artists to spend too much time on one piece of work. Thank you for your advice

Rizal_Suhaimi

After careful consideration, I decided to just go back and tidy up the UV unwrap. Hopefully, the unwrap is acceptable this time.

Rizal_Suhaimi

This is a breakdown of how I painted the iron material

Rizal_Suhaimi

My wood material

Rizal_Suhaimi

For the leather grip, I just tried to replicate what I saw on a similar asset by another artist on ArtStation.

Rizal_Suhaimi

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