[WIP] Buck 538 Small Game Knife
polycounter lvl 5
Been working on this little knife for a bit. Loosely followed the Tim Bergholz tutorial on knife modelling. Didn't want to do the exact same knife though so figured I would give this one a go cause I thought it looked cool. Still have lots of little details to put into the texturing but its coming along alright. Did a low poly then sub-d for the high poly then baked in painter. Crits welcome!
Heres the actual knife
And here's where I'm at
Heres the actual knife
And here's where I'm at
Replies
But its ruined by the muddy random noise on the blade. Do a clean version first then start adding dirt and grime in increments. Also theres a scratch in the blade so deep that it looks like it was made with a sword. This is probably steel one of the most durable material in the world, not aluminium. A cut like that is highly unlikely to happen.
The handle is missing a bevel, dont know if that was intentional but thought i should mention it.
Sure, here's the wires on the low poly. Definitely had to fight the urge to make everything 4 sided and perfect. In the vid Tim talks a lot about how its going to be triangulated anyways so not to worry about it too much (but not to use that as an excuse to do shitty modelling). Not sure if I achieved that or not.
You're right, I probably should do a clean version then work from there. I'll give that a go.
Just layers of materials and whatnot in Painter. I started with the default American Cherry material and went from there.
Thanks, I've definitely been struggling with that sharpened part and tweaking it to look like the ref. How is this, better or worse? I feel like its too busy now but not sure..
Finally, I'd second what someone said earlier about optimization. With the handle and metal being more or less the same profile, the wood parts and the metal center could be the same model in your low poly, and you could bake it with color id maps to add metal to the center.
Hey, thanks! The suggestion about the edge made a lot of sense so I fixed that. I liked the dirty version too and always planned to do a dirty version after I dialed in the rest of it.
About the optimization of the model, isn't it kind of too late for that by now though? At this point I might want to push on to the next model and try to make it as optimized as possible in the modeling stage. I hadn't made any 3d models for about a year prior to this knife so just wanted to use it to remember some things and keep moving on forward.
I went ahead and finished the clean version with a slightly different handle colouring as suggested, did the dirty version and am thinking of trying some other texture variants. I threw together a stealth version as well, which looks pretty cool.
In reality there are a couple of other variants of the knife as well that I might try, there's a white handled one with a leaf emblem that looks quite cool. Might give that a go.
Here is the version I like and am going to try to do next
And heres the mesh so far
I'm guessing I might need to add a bit more geometry to the low poly along the seem between the blade and handle? Any ideas welcome?
The high poly looks good
But the bake ends up looking like this here
Other than those traditional methods you can try decreasing the ray distance, using a custom cage or just fix it in photoshop.
All of those methods have pros and cons and i dont know which one is the best in your case but i suggest lowering the ray distance first, thats the cheapest - if that doesnt work, then one of the first two methods.
So, instead, I was able to fix it by detaching the handle from the blade and having them as separate meshes. I also tried to bring a bit of geo in behind the handle and blade before I detached it but the result, although better, was not quite what I wanted. I left the added geo to make a better shadow and detached it and now it fixed the issue! FINALLY!
I do wish I could have solved it some other more proper way but had had enough of fiddling with things trying to get the perfect bake. It does kind of defeat the whole one mesh plan but oh well, this looks better, and thats what matters! Now, I can actually start to texture this version, which I'm looking forward to doing. Especially the engraved feather part. Wish me luck
nothing to be ashamed of in fixing UV's in photoshop, wasting a time waiting and hoping for the perfect bake is more noobish IMO...
The direction I'm heading now is that I have made the feather design as a floater in max and baked it onto the high poly. Still need a bit of tweaking on it but its going ok so far. Definitely spent a dumb amount of time on it so far but couldn't think of another way to do it. Probably should have done it in zbrush or something and it would have been faster but what can ya do. "shrug"
Disregard the textures, they're just placeholder at this point. Will add more of a burnt in look to the feather like the reference once I get the look right.
So here's where I'm at with the feathered version of the knife. Couldn't nail the depth of the feathers quite like I wanted but I still think it looks pretty good. Let me know what you think.