After some fiddling I finally figured out how to use the thumbnail system (solution: don’t).
I wanted to do several japanese styled swords, not directly after any historical pieces, but closely according to them. This is because there’s a lot of katana models out there that are either modeled accurately to the reference but the reference is a decorative replica sword, or the model hasn’t been to my own liking too much. The idea is to get some renders of different sort of swords side by side so people could see how different just a single sword type can be.
I’m currently using Blender 2.62 and this is some of my first Cycles renders, took my GTX 460 some 40 seconds.
Any ideas what colour combinations, themes on the fittings, or blade/hamon types you’d like to see are welcome.
Here’s a third one, this time a Shobu-zukuri geometry (the tip tapers more into a point) with less nagako-sori (tang/handle curvature), and with horimono (carving on the blade) and suhuga (straight) hamon (temper line).
I didn’t do the koshirae (handle ornaments) well for the green and brown one yet, deciding on themes (I’ll just call them by the handle wrap colours for simplicity’s sake from now on.) I might go with the cliche stuff, give the green a leaf/flower theme (like the one on the blue one now), and change tbe blue/black into night/clouds/tsunami, and give the brown a fuji/mountain/earth themes…
I also changed the background and foreground colours to separate the blades from the background a bit.
EDIT: I think I made the blades too short, they all resemble wakizashis, or are too broad. On top of that, I started feeling like re-doing all of them in a more anal retentive nature.
Thanks, the bottom one was supposed to be a ko-katana, because when I started doing it I was immensely annoyed how stretched katana renders looked, and you couldn’t see the detail of the blade well from the overall shot because it was too long to fit into the shot horizontally from close-up.
I had another second thought, I think I’ll just apply some displacement maps to the handle ito but won’t re-do anything because of reasons and things, it’s “close enough” unless you go really macro on it, which wasn’t the idea anyway.
I can do a render with multi-layered hamon and complex materials and a hand-modeled horimono on the blade later, but right now I’ll do a bunch of these for giggles.
