Valkyrie, Hellbane and Gaudy Short Swords

Key Responsibilities:

Design, Low/High Poly Modeling, Texture Creation, Baking, 3D Animation, Lighting, Rendering, UV Mapping, Post-Production Editing

Work In Progress Post: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DABL9e

Tanner Myers, 2022

This sword began life as a small sketch in my notebook and was originally designed to be a quick, easy model to make in a day or two. Once I got its original design down pat, I really began to wonder what all I could do with other textures which lead me to creating the two other skins above and that lead it to be a much larger project.

The sketch was placed in the background of a Maya file and used as the bases for the low and high resolution model. For this model, I simply smoothed a copy of the low resolution after adding holding edges, as I felt like that would give me the most room to create multiple, interesting designs as too many consistent normal details would make them feel same-y. I more or less had made myself a 3D canvas to texture upon. This lead a lot of the details to be added though procedural textures in Substance Painter after I baked the initial maps in Marmoset 3.

The baking went smoothly and the texturing even more so. There is a certain flow that one gets into when they're enveloped in their craft and this was a prime example. The first two textures were done in 3-4 afternoons of work with the third taking a bit longer. I used all custom Substances that I either created from scratch or integrated aspects of Quixel Megascans. Megascans were used for the leather base as well as the main metal on the Valkyrie.

I really wanted to make them feel somewhat different despite having the same base, so I did my best to vary them not only with differing colour pallets, but also with differences in height. As I mentioned before, the baked Normal Map had very little secondary detail. This allowed me to create interesting, unique patterns with Fill Masks, Noise Gradients and Generators of all sorts. I feel like this is best exemplified in the metallic weave on the bellow the grip of the Valkyrie and the blade of the Hellbane. After the first texture was finalized, I created a small animation in Maya of the sword's rings and orb moving to add some visual interest. This animation was exported to Marmoset where the next few steps took place.

Lighting these was an absolute blast. I had 3 separate lighting and skybox setups, one for each of the skins. The red being the darkest to push its more sinister look. Congruent among all 3 of them was a light on a turn table that would remain in sink as the skins went from one to the other in the final video. This allowed the transitions to be smooth and the passing light gave the hilt a neat highlight as it turned. I feel like it worked especially well on the Valkyrie Short Sword. (That's the Blue Raspberry looking one.)

I also imported them to both Unity and Unreal to check for any errors. I had one with the way the lighting was calculated due to an overlapping UV that was quickly fixed. The model clocks in at around 2.7k tris and could easily be brought down to 1.5k or less with minimal effort and quality loss if it was needed.

Final renders were modified in Photoshop to enhance lighting and bloom. This is just because despite how much I love Marmoset, I prefer the look of the bloom from Eeevee, Unity, or one I can create in post using Illustrator or Photoshop. In this case, I chose Photoshop. Any enhanced lighting was done thought screens/linear dodge layers and masking out lowlights to create more vibrant reflections/bloom effects.

The next project will be an environment as seen at the top of the work in progress from above.

Cheers!