Sword and Demon Production Blog

 Before starting the texturing process, I noticed that the UV of the parts were very simple, so I decided to merge the UV's together inside Maya by grouping them and aligning them into a single UV tile. Then I exported the UV and started the texturing inside substance painter. As expected, the texturing required me to work on different parts of the sword with multiple paint layers and sub-layers as everything was combined into one shader this time. Although the effect of the blade was a bit challenging as I had to use multiple hard and soft brushes, the other parts of the sword were fairly simple to texture. Most of the texturing was done using soft brushes and fill layers. After I finished texturing, I started to work on the rendering part. Just like the demon project, I imported the textures in my already existing sword project file inside Maya. Then I added some Arnold lights and shaders and after that, I set up a turn table camera and a platform setup for the shadows and made a...

 After blocking everything inside of Maya, I brought back the model into ZBrush to subdivide and sculpt higher detail into the sword. Especially for the blade and the joint part where there was a lot more potential for detailed design. I started with the blade, I gave it the amount of scratches and shatters it had according to the concept image. And after I was happy with the blade, I started working on the handle, added a little more detail to the handle and the guard. And finally I detailed the joint part which needed a lot of subtle detail. I decided to not detail the chain any further because the chain was already good enough in the lowpoly version and the smooth preview from Maya was good enough for a render. And if needed, I could just subdivide it later to make it a bit smoother which although likely won't be needed. This is the final result after detailing everything. I am happy with the overall amount of detail so far and now am ready to begin the texturing process.