---

as you can probably tell, i love elden ring. i was working on the mea culpa from blasphemous but found that maliketh’s black blade would give me better practice with blender’s sculpting tools. i also managed to get my hands on substance 3d painter over the holidays and wanted to try it out!

my first elden ring character was a badly-made strength/faith build; when the dlc released, i remade the character into an actually useful fighter, in large part due to maliketh’s black blade. it hits hard, and its destined death ability works a little too well on colossal enemies.

while i used displacement maps to get details on the hilt, the blade itself was all sculpted in blender. this required a lot of guess work, as the blade is so dark in reference images that it was hard to tell what was going on. i also used some rock brushes to give texture to the hilt at the very end to make it look more beat up.

because sculpting requires such a high poly count in blender (one of its bigger faults), i had to reduce topo wherever i could. the guard especially only needed more polygons on its top and bottom faces for displacement maps, so i gradually removed edges along the side edges.

i’m still figuring out the best way to export from substance painter to blender; i can’t tell if it’s the program or just how i light a scene (i’ve never been the best renderer). i experimented a lot with glass and slate rock materials to try and replicate the blade’s shiny obsidian look.

edit: i spent some time the next morning reworking some painter export settings and messing with the blender compositor. the final rendered images have been replaced with those results (which i find look better)

AS ALWAYS, THANK YOU FOR READING. I’M HOPING TO DO SOME 3D MODELING RECREATIONS OF MORE ARCHITECTURAL ITEMS THAT HAVE INTERESTED ME LATELY.