Question: Just inboard of the right-hand stand arm, there is a dark streak on the blade. Is that a shadow, a surface artifact, or a texture artifact? It looks like the blade has a flaw
I’m not sure what’s going on with the AA. How did you save the image?
er… i don’t know what you’re… uh… what you’re talking about… yeah, it’s just a crappy texture. i’m a bad texture artist, so sue me. anyways, i’ll probably go back and redo it later, i just wanted to see if i could it it to work.
as for the AA, i save the picture as a TGA (because i’m too lazy to remember to change it) and then i use a program to convert to jpg. but even as the TGA there are jagged edges. i remember someone once said something about rendering the image double size and then shrinking it down to get rid of jagged edges, i might try that.
BTW, the bad AA is due to a glitch (or poor choice) in the rendering code. Someone over on blender.org has just patched the problem, so maybe we’ll see it fixed in the next release.
yeah, i know. i just put it in so the katana wasn’t floating in the middle of nowhere. besides, it isn’t about the stand, just the katana. hmm… maybe i will just have it floating there.
I see you tricked out the tsuba. nice. You know,…it just occured to me, if you wanted to give it a really exotic look, you could emulate the pattern of folded steel. (incorrectly reffered to as ‘damascus’)
That “folded” texture is really not visible as folds in a high quality blade. The Jihada (or skin texture) is a very subtle, deep, nearly translucent crystaline structure. Of course, the jihada varies with the Era, school and region, but the Hamon is by far the most prominant visual feature.
The act of folding is not to achieve a “ply” or layered texture. It’s actually the opposite: a technique for reducing the carbon content of the steel while blending metal of varied carbon content into a unform mass.
Total carbon is reduced by about .03% per fold. The myth of folding 10,000 times is a bit silly when you realize that the steel starts out between .5-1.7% carbon. That many folds would pretty much result in 0% carbon which == regular Iron!
The truth is that a Japanese blade is typically folded between 12-16 times depending on the smith’s judge of the original carbon content (which he judges by the color of the metal!!). This results in between 4 and 65 thousand “layers”, which may account for the myth of the ten thousand folds.
On the other hand, Damascus steel was most likely made by blending high and low carbon steel in a crucible and melting into liquid form, then poured into a clay mold.
Well that texture on the blade looks really good. That’s interesting about the Japanese swords. I know a little bit about the Persian variety, but not very much about the Japanese variety. The key it turns out to the persian type sword making was apparently a sort of slow, low temperature process that must have taken ages. It was made primarity from a combination of the metals wutz and carburite.
http://users.mnsi.net/~mdss/katana5.jpg
i think i’m nearly done with it. i’ll change the menuki and maybe work on the on the material for the wrap on the handle a little more but that’s about it.
will it be an accurate representaion of a real katana? not bloody likely
will it be a stylized katana for a ninja in a game? i’m hopin’ so!