[wip] Hunting knife

Acies

Hello polycount.
A little about me:
I have been lurking this forum for a while now, registering seemed far away though - since everyone here is on a whole other level than me. I started modeling a little less than a year ago as a hobby and I find it very fun!

The model:
As part of my learning process I want to make a hunting knife and holster influenced by the swedish "samer" (http://www.hederstrom.se/mhg/files/gimgs/13_samer1.jpg). It would allow me to work with metal, wood and leather. It would also allow me to do some sculpting, "beautiful renders" and hopefully I'll be able to better grasp the process of making a quality model.

Gathered pictures of different knives:
http://i.imgur.com/1MVu3.jpg


Low-poly Wired:



Low-poly render


UV of metal parts of knife:



Any tips to what I should be mindful of or just pointing out flat-out stupid mistakes I make are welcome :>

dfacto

I don't know what you're doing this for, but if it's game-art then you have far too many polys on the blade of the knife. Basically for low poly, if it doesn't affect the silhouette, then just get rid of the polygon. The knife is good for sculpting since you have roughly square polygons everywhere, but for UV and in-game implementation you're wasting a lot of polygons on the blade and handle. Select loops and delete them. If the silhouette of the model is almost exactly the same you didn't really need that loop anyways.

Olli.

i cant see any roughly square polygons at all. except for maybe the very back of the handle.

Really if you're intending to use this for anything other than offline rendering i suggest you redo your topology

Acies

Thank you for the answers. I won't be using this for a game, just for rendering purposes. Which is why I added (unnecessary) lines to it - that mostly stems from my assumption that it would make the render better when looked at from a closer distance. Should I try to remove loops or will that remove detail from my render?

It's purpose is mainly to be beautiful once rendered, and allow me to learn to use sculpting and texturing to bring forward small details. It's basically going to be an attempt doing my own twist on following this tutorial: http://www.nextgenhardsurface.com/index.php?pageid=racer445