Week 10 – My VFX Blog

This week I made huge progress on texturing my sword. I went through multiple design changes this week, but at the end settled on what I thought fit the design most.

After texturing my blade, I next turned to texturing the top piece of my sword. For the first half of this week, my plan was to try out an ‘arcane’ type of design plan, and colour pallete. Here was my design inspiration for this:

https://www.wowhead.com/guide/legion/artifacts/aluneth-arcane-mage
https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-MXGRH0yFrpalddqj2BP
https://aminoapps.com/c/wow/page/item/arcane-magic/06vC_ZIKJ3Lm51R8GXooZe2WxEwgmJ6
https://mobcup.net/wallpaper/arcane-sc7qk8po
https://wambamzamzam.weebly.com/tod-academy-of-arcane-studi

The colours exude purples, oranges and blues. I used substance painter to create the textures. My normal method was to add a copper under material, and after baking the meshes I would add a mask of steel rough edge scratches to add some wear to the material. I would then add details by hand if needed. First, I textured the second ring around the orb.

I then textured the inner diamond, adding a celtic cross with the stamp tool for an extra essence of magic and medevil aesthetic to the sword.

I then did the same method for the inner ring, using the same colours.

Next, I started on the dragon wings. I had some issues with the mesh and UVs for these, The topology needed fixing as there were n-gons, as well ans the UVs needed to be more accurate to the flow of the mesh. After going back and forth with these issues, my texturing was finally working and I could open them in substance painter and texture them. I chose a purple hue for these,

I then worked on the little spikes under the wings, giving them a more lilac tone this time.

The spcae between my blade and top piece seemed like too much of a clean contrast, almost unnatural, so I created a simple indent ring and textured this.

I then worked on the horns. I made these the same colour and wear amount as the wings for consistency. I also textured the moon more of a light blue colour, with some wear around the edges.

I then made a simple surface shader for my orb. I increased the glow to max capcity and made it a turqouise colour as a temporary texture.

I checked my overall sword in rendering to see how the design ws going:

It was then time to move onto the handle. I needed to again go back and fix UVs on this too. I gave it a more rough steel material and added stamps of blood and cracks in various places, as my sword looked too clean.

I then decided to make a proper texture for my orb. I created a glowing orb in subsatnce painter using the glow tool and glass texture.

This didn’t look right in maya, and didn’t give the effect I wanted. What actually worked better was using the ai standard surface preset of glass, and adjusting the specular and transmission effects to create a glowing blue texture.

I then checked my overall sword again in render:

About halfway into this week, I had a change of heart on design for my sword. I loved this design, but something about it wasn’t as eye opening as I originally wanted. I decided to take direct references from a game which inspired this sword design to begin with: World of warcraft.

One of my favourite classes to be on WoW is a death knight, with a speciality of ‘blood’ damage. This is a certain aesthetic which is very satifying to the eye especially to me in fantasy games, here are some inspiration photos:

https://skycoach.gg/blog/wow/articles/blood-death-knight-guide
https://www.tentonhammer.com/guides/world-of-warcraft-blood-death-knight-class-guide
https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/blood-death-knight-pve-tank-guide
https://www.wowhead.com/guide/classes/death-knight/blood/overview-pv

The colour pallete and theme is full of reds and blues, a really interesting colour mix due to the contrast of warm and cold colours. I really wanted to explore this design as well as the arcane theme, and make my desicion from there.

Before changing the textures, you may have realised I had an issue with my texturing on my dragon wing mesh in previous renders. There were a select few faces around the models that were darker or lighter, the opposite to the rest.

I went through a day of solving issues with this topoligy, and found it was due to overlapping faces and holes in my mesh. I then had to re-do Uvs and then I was able to continue.

I re textured some of my materials with a darker red colour. I also sized in the top piece such as the rings, as I felt there was too much empty space. I made minor changes such as making things more or less worn, adding more details and blood to certain areas, but here is the development of re-texturing my model:

I tried this out on my original HDRI to see if the lighting was better, as some of the details you can’t see in these. I also made the blade match colours with the metal on the handle, and made the horns slighly lighter to see the details better.

When I was happy with this progress, I started animating the orb. I got it to turn 360 degrees and bob slightly up and down, to indicate it is floating.