Warhammer Axe

Mark Dygert

I started this over the holiday break it started out as a test, I wanted to try and make the braided cord and the handle in high poly as a proof on an idea I had, and it just grew from there. It was pretty fun just picking something up and running with it. It was also fun to be able to crank out a small project instead of chip away at a large one.

I really wasn't sure what the grip was made of so I went for a braided leather hopefully it reads like that... On the concept it almost looks like stone or metal? I dunno... There are a few other things that bug me about and I'm sure there are 2-3 things you guys will suggest that will be good points. I might do 1-2 more passes on the materials long with a re-bake before I call it kaput.

cholden

Tightly woven leather, tanned and braided to represent the proud dwarven beard.

MatthewS

OK so first off I like the braided leather better than what i believe is reptile skin or scales for the handle. The only thing that bugs me is it seems a little too shiny for a handle, I think it would be more worn than it is...

Major things I see that make it look kind of dull is the metal and the gold.

The metal is reading really stony right now compared to the concept and I think it has to do with a lack of specular.

And the gold looks like fabric or paint. It really doesn't pop out like it does in the concept. It looks like this is caused by the lighting and spec but also because it looks very flat. Try boosting the ao around the gold and see if the extra contrast helps.

Are you using specular and normal maps or is this just a diffuse model?

Can we get some flats and a 3/4 view shot?

Overall I would say try to increase the shininess of all of the metal either through better lighting and more passes on the spec or through directional light in the diffuse. I think you can really get this one up there.

Afterthought, The gem is way too dull, push it to be more like the concept, right now it looks like cheesy turquoise instead of sapphire.

makecg

Pop the textures out a bit more looking badass though great job !

tda

Looks real good vig, true to the concept. Maybe it's your lighting kinda killing the spec, but if not the the material could do with having the reflection and spec boosted a bit on the metal parts, and maybe a slightly higher spec on the leather braid to match the concept. You could also try adding some golden yellow into the spec if you haven't already to help that gold material read the same as the concept.

Mark Dygert

Good feedback as always, love ya guys, you're awesome!

cholden wrote: »

Tightly woven leather, tanned and braided to represent the proud dwarven beard.

Ahh that makes a sense heh. But that's clearly an elf axe =P

MatthewS wrote: »

The only thing that bugs me is it seems a little too shiny for a handle, I think it would be more worn than it is...

Major things I see that make it look kind of dull is the metal and the gold.
The metal is reading really stony right now compared to the concept and I think it has to do with a lack of specular.

And the gold looks like fabric or paint. It really doesn't pop out like it does in the concept. It looks like this is caused by the lighting and spec but also because it looks very flat. Try boosting the ao around the gold and see if the extra contrast helps.

Are you using specular and normal maps or is this just a diffuse model?

Great points! The spec mask is not much more than a straight AO bake at this point with a gradient ramp in max to darken it up so it doesn't look like its been shrink wrapped in plastic heh, it was better to almost take it out than put it in in a crappy unfinished state. I haven't touched the spec color at all either. I think if I get cracking on the spec it will really help almost everything start to click.

makecg wrote: »

Pop the textures out a bit more looking badass though great job !

Thanks and I totally agree. I haven't done much texture work over the last year except for some TF2 stuff and some misc projects here and there, so rusty... heh.

tda wrote: »

Looks real good vig, true to the concept. Maybe it's your lighting kinda killing the spec, but if not the the material could do with having the reflection and spec boosted a bit on the metal parts, and maybe a slightly higher spec on the leather braid to match the concept. You could also try adding some golden yellow into the spec if you haven't already to help that gold material read the same as the concept.

The lighting and the gradient ramp on the spec are washing quite a bit of the spec out right now.

Next time around I'll get some varied angle shots too, as well as some construction shots that outline how I made some of the pieces like the handle, it would be good to see how other people might approach the same things maybe in a different way.

Thanks for the feedback! It rocked!

Mark Dygert

Worked on the braided leather, after doing some research I redid my approach and actually braided poly strips together and applied a 360 bend to wrap it around the handle.

I also redid the cord around the blade. Instead of twisting a single cylinder like I did the first time, I used 4 cylinders and twisted them together like rope then path deformed that around the blade.

I rearranged the UV layout a lot more mirroring and was able to keep the textel density roughly the same but shrink the texture sheet size.

I rebaked everything and started over on the diffuse so it looks a little naked right now, but I think the normal bake came out a lot better. The Mental Ray AO bake came out like piss, lots of MRAO errors, missed rays around the gem and ugly patches here and there. I might try a scanline AO bake before I invest a bunch of time cleaning it up.

I'm not really sure how I'm going to get the damage on the blade into the normal map. I might take it into Zbrush and re-do it there... or I might just wuss out and add it to the normal map...

I haven't worked much on the spec but even in its limited capacity I think its helping. Need to get the AO sorted out first before I dig into the spec...

Mark Dygert

Spent a few hours touching up the materials, still need to rebake the normal map, properly pad the UV shells (I have a rebake trick for that). The normal map, has quite a few errors I need to fix on the cage and high poly smoothing has some wonky areas, but its getting closer to where I want it.





Diffuse

Spec Mask

Spec Color

Normal

r_fletch_r

Looking awesome Mark, are you going to put an environment map on it? that'd really punch out the metals.

Also a technical question. Why split spec colour and spec level?