Practice caution when handling a glass sword

Artwork Finished Projects
#1

http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/8492/shatteredbladehdmarble3.png
http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/8492/shatteredbladehdmarble3.png

Nothing really special, though it looks nice. I’ll admit it was rather easy to make, since I used the boolean modifier to help me crack the sword apart. I also use Game Engine rigid body physics to drop the pieces “realistically”.

I know the shattering itself isn’t realistic; if an actual glass sword were dropped the blade would be most likely to be obliterated. But then it wouldn’t look nice, would it? :stuck_out_tongue:

This was my 3rd revision after someone gave CC. You can see my first two below; all that’s different is the floor:
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/2329/shatteredbladehd.png (Version 1)
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/4456/shatteredbladehdmarble2.png (Version 2)

#2

Your revisions look better but it is missing a lot of small pieces. Other thing is that I don’t see the reactions that light has with glass. I could think that as clear plastic if I didn’t know better. Last thing is that the floor texture looks to big for the sword. The scale of it makes the sword feel smaller than it is.

#3

^^ you mean caustics?
I think this looks plausable without them, but they can be achieved or faked using various methods :smiley:

The sword looks good, but I reckon a better floor texture would boost the overall image.

#4

I meant caustics but also how certain types of glass (idk if this is suppose to be more like crystal) split the wavelengths of light like a prism. But it is true you can fake caustics.

#5

Hmm, anything I look up about Caustics in Blender seems outdated. I’m finding topics here from '08, and many have responses like “This feature is useless IMO, its simply not a caustic”. And any time a tutorial is linked, it goes to a web domain that someone else has bought out and used for something unrelated…

Can someone link me a tutorial on how to achieve caustics in Blender 2.5x? Preferably one that still works in 2.58… And also a distinction between “real” and “fake” caustics? I’m using the Yafaray engine for this, if that helps.

And @gat19g: The floor texture in revision 3 (the first image in the topic) is meant to imitate a similar real marble floor, and compared to that, makes the sword appear at the correct size. For reference, the sword should be about 1.3 feet (roughly).

At any rate, @Casio23, what can I do to make the floor better? I’ve never been that good with floors. This one uses 8 procedural textures, some of which influence specularity or normals, and one of which is a stencil.

#6

Oh, so it’s more like a dagger/short sword than a normal sword length.