I had high expectations for how realistic I could make this sword look with the maps and textures. But unfortunately, my ambition far exceeded my talent this time around. I started off by creating some high poly geometry for the filigry that’s located on both sides of the sword.
Even though I was fairly happy with how the geometry turned out, baking it into the low poly object turned into a disaster. I’m not exactly sure where it went wrong thus my inability to address it, but I suspect it has something to do with having the filigry’s on both sides. It’s seems that the undersides of the filigry’s were were been baked even though they shouldn’t have been seen by the projection cage. Nothing I tried worked and after about three hours trying to figure it out, I had to move on.
After this I took the UVW into Photoshop and began the texturing process. For the diffuse I created a brushed metal finish for all the metal components slightly altering the darkness of the colour. After I finished the diffuse I wanted to try my hand at creating a specular and a bump map to make up for the botched normal map attempt. For the bump map I simply reduced the saturation so that the texture became black and white with a few small tweaks here and there to emphasize some spots on the filigry and handle. For the specular I reduced the saturation again but also adjusted the brightness and contrast on the various areas of the texture so that the handle wouldn’t reflect light at all while the metal parts did.
With the specular and bump done I added some gloss parameters to the pommel and cross guard of the sword to give them some more emphasis when hit by the light. Once the gloss was added I made some final tweaks to the values and considered the texturing process done. Overall I’m not happy with how it turned out, I have a lot more to learn with the texturing process in order to create realistic models.
Luke Jarrett "HuffnPuff" 