Sword and Demon Production Blog

 Since this time I was working on a hard surface model, the workflow required simultaneously switching between Maya and ZBrush to achieve the best results in fastest possible amount of time. At first, I decided the parts of the sword I wanted as separate entities. After thinking for a while, I decided to make the sword in 5 parts and keep them separate. At first I wanted to make it 3 parts. One for the handle, one for the blade and one for the overlaying chains and the lock. But during the modeling process, I figured out that if I split the handle in 3 different parts, I could model things easily. So, I separated the handle, the guard and the joint into 3 parts.               I started with the blade as it was the main part and the easiest part of the sword. Also, I need the blade to match the proportion of the rest of the elements of the sword. So I started with a cube as it looks mostly like a squared shape and used ZModeler to make th...

 After completing the Demon, I was more excited to work on a sword. And since I was now more confident to try on making unique shaped models, I wanted to make a sword that had a bit complex shape rather than plain realistic swords. This time I wanted to make a stylized sword that had fragments and ornaments in it. So far I had tried sculpting various shapes. I wanted to see if I could do better in hard surface modelling as well. So, I started to look for stylized swords that were complex looking. As I had finished the demon project a bit earlier than expected, I had more time to spare for the sword so I wasn't afraid to do something more complex. After searching for a while, I selected a rather complex looking sword concept by Arthur Malagon on Art Station. This sword is part of a batch of sword concepts that he called "Swordtember". And the title of this particular concept is "Shattered". Probably because this sword looks shattered n fragments and held togethe...

 After completing retopology and cutting the UV pieces, I reimported the model back inside ZBrush to generate the higher resolution bake for the model and then I started baking and texturing inside Substance Painter. I already had the mesh separated so it was easier to texture as I had each element as a separate shader. I had the body, the tubes, the eyes and the teeth in 4 separate shaders. Teeth and tubes having no secondary colors or variations, I could instantly fill them with their respective colors from the concept art. Then I started doing the eyes which had outer base color and some patterns and color variations for the iris. I used circular paint brushes and with a few patterns and subtle strokes, I was quickly able to block out the iris shape with different stacking paint layers. Then I did the body part. After filling the base color, I used stacking layers and a circle brush for the round spots on the outside of the body, then I painted the inside of the mouth as illustr...

 Since I already had the character brought into Maya, I started retopologizing right after modelling and connecting the eye sockets for the model. The first thing I started with was the body itself. It was the biggest part of the model compared to the other tubes and stuff and it consisted of one connected piece of geometry so it was also easy to manage. So, I isolated it from the rest of the model and started retopology using the quad draw tool. I started with the mouth area as it was an obvious point of deformation during animation. So I wanted to make sure that it had enough faces and the edge flow was all centered to the mouth.So, I started with the outside of the mouth, then I completed the inside of the mouth and connected it to the outer part where I had some wrinkles. And from the wrinkly part, I just kept extruding my faces outwards in all directions until I had wrapped around all the sides, the top of the head and reached the transition points of the feet. From here, I bl...

 So, after completing the body and feet, I was eager to make the tube of the demon that holds eyes at the end. However, I needed a sound plan before I could model this the shape was not just a cylinder with curvature, It also had eye sockets at it's end which were thin and welded seamlessly with the tubes themselves. So I decided to break this process down into 2 parts. Part 1 was where I was going to make the curved tubes and then part 2 was going to make the eye socket. But I was going to do part 2 after making the eyes because the shape of the eye sockets depends on the shapes of the eyes themselves. So, After making the tubes from curve brush with a cylinder base mesh, I used the sphere base mesh for the eyes, as in the concept, the eyes were looking perfectly spherical rather than eye shaped. So far I was doing everything inside of ZBrush. But after making the eyes and teeth, I decided to model the eye socket in Maya instead of ZBrush because I wanted to do it in lower subdivi...