Finishing up assignment 2 posts

Aha, we are finishing up the assignment 2 blog posts and we are doing it right now. So, we have basically all the posts I haven’t done in one.

I will begin by bringing up something that I forgot to put in last time.

Style. The artifact we created was to be made in one of three styles, like Skyrim (realistic usable) Asterix and Obelix (cartoony) or Uncharted (realistic but old, all ancient artifact-ish)

My first thoughts on the subject was that I wasted to make a realistic sword like one would see in Skyrim. I was quite set on this idea until I realized that I would have to make a realistic texture and since I am quite unsecure about my 3d work I thought that a more cartoony style might serve me better.

This however was not something that I kept in mind the whole time. I skirted back and forth between the styles too much and should just have gone with the cartoon style full out. I did not really think too much of it early on, I was just working and never really took a good look at it as a whole, only the part that I was working on at the moment and therefore when I was Almost finished I realized my mistake but by that point I felt I did not want to redo it and just let it go for what it was.

But, on to UV mapping.

I split the blade up into the different loops that would build up the different parts on most real swords of this kind. I split the hilt into many small parts in a thought that I would be easier to make me able to fit things together in the UV better. By being able to move all the parts around and fit them into each other I was hoping to be able to make the UV bigger and save on dead space between the actual texture in the picture.

First UV

Updated UV

Space was however wasted since I a bit into making the Normal map realized that getting the UV edges to match up real good would be a bit hard and I thought that going back into the UV unwrap and simply folding the seams back upon themselves so that they were basically mirrored on both sides would make everything go much faster without much need for fine calibration and hand painting on the normal maps.

I also split the blade in two, this made some problems as I needed to make sure that all the maps fitted together precisely at the junction and this took quite some time to get right.

This was done in order to keep the texture size uniform and still utilize as much of theThere  were also some problems with the normal map and specular map working together to make reflections around the seam off angle. UV space as possible.

To the model I say that it was quite easy, I was a bit surprised that so few planes were needed to make a relatively smooth looking bend around the hilt.

The rivets were horrifyingly heavy on tris and I thought about making a flatter kind of rivet found on some migration era swords but decided against it since I liked the look of the long rivets

The diffuse map was drawn by first looking at bronze and brass. I looked at both brass and bronze ingots, rods as well as reproductions of actual sword hilts made of bronze and brass of the Germanic migration era. This to get a feeling of the metals looks since I have worked almost zero with color.

I also took a look at pattern welded blades and thinking on how the patterns work.

I then drew the pattern mirrored it backwards, sliced it in half and moved one side lightly off center.

This to get the feeling of the way that the patterns take form and the way that pattern welding usually works. If Ihad gone with a realistic style I would not have made a pattern welded blade since I wanted to avoid making all the different kinds of metal of different shades of grey folded around the each other.

While I made the bronze hilt I realized that just a more or less flat color was a bit boring so I made some shades in it to make it look a bit banged up.

The grip went through so many iterations that I at the end just kind of gave up and let it be, I made a quick quite realistic wood texture that might have been okay  if I had kept the grain bigger and more pronounced in a cartoony way. But It was pretty good for what it was but not what it was supposed to be.

The feeling of the blade being more cartoony than the handle is a bit jarring.

The normal and specular maps were made with Crazybump and I really didn’t do all that much with them. Mostly I cleared out the horrible seam in the middle of the blade.

The normalmap gave some eary issiues and made the edge look soft, that was fixed with smoothing groups andsome handwork on the normal map. soothinggroups were also reworked all over the hilt

I also made the error of creating the normal and specular maps before the diffuse was finished wich resulted in those very clear reflective lines at the bottom of the blade. Also it is too bright overall.

This resulted in me remaking the specular and normal map and once again fitting the seam in the middle of the blade together.

I was very lazy with the new specular, basily just leaving it alone and making segments brighter or duller.

Recap I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, work for the most part lots of trial and error and error. But it turned out okay, I got myself a finished model that is a bit of a mess style-wise but still look good enough at a distance.