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in my final year at utk, i decided that i only enjoyed design up to the 3d modeling part; seeing a design get building-ized always felt demoralizing. thus, i decided to start learning blender so that i had options beyond strict architecture; namely, video game creation. i did some little tutorials here and there, but it wasn’t until very recently that i really dug in and began “swords & swords”, a series of video game sword models intended to transfer my 5 years of rhino 3d skills into blender.

i managed to beat the shadow of the erdtree’s final boss pre-nerf and fell in love with the milady weapon. my poor spell blade (named “gun”) had no business being elden lord until he got his hands on this thing. with frostbite affinity, wing stance, and some talisman changes, he became a graceful machine gun of a man.

the pommel presented some newcomer challenges to my blender journey. i originally modeled it without displacement maps, rotating the bottom vertices in a very disgusting way to create the ending turn. once i found a good workflow for creating maps, however, i went back and fixed my mistakes.

a lack of good reference images became challenging when drawing displacement maps. i often had to make things up as references either didn’t show something or were incredibly blurry. these were drawn in rhino 3d (my preferred tracing software) and imported into illustrator, where feathering and outer glows were applied. this last step is what gives the displacement a more curved fall off!

rhino 3d famously doesn’t care for meshes and, therefore, topology. i thankfully didn’t struggle to understand how to work with quads whenever possible, in large part to my rapid start as a 3d artist in late august, but i did have to create some test swords aside from this project in order to understand better ways to model with topology in mind.

edit: i’ve gone back to re-texture and re-render using Substance painter and the blender compositor! here are some sp screenshots: