Hello there! As my first beginner project with no tutorial help, I decided to create a sword. I started modelling after a reference image, and I really enjoyed it. The main problem I have is with materials and lighting. I don’t feel the sword looks realistic, and I believe this is because of bad lighting and bad texturing. For the lighting, I used a plane with 7.5 strength put to emit, while for texturing I used metal and wooden textures found on the internet. I mixed the textures with a glossy shader. Yet, I feel it isn’t enough. I doesn’t look realistic at all. Any advice?
For texturing tutorials, I found Andrew Price’s tutorials on the basics of realistic texturing, but that is for a street (aka a walking plane), while a sword has no bumps, so it isn’t of much help. Also, after finishing modelling, because I was unable to get a realistic look, I searched for tutorials for creating swords. I only found tutorials on recreating swords, and the persons making the tutorials simply said to unwrap the sword on the reference image. I don’t want that, I want to be able to create swords from scratch also, without a reference image, and for this, I need good material and texturing knowledge.
I rendered with 250 samples. Thanks for your time and help!
References images are important if you want to improve the technique without to concentrate on designing a believable sword before modeling it. But anyways, I really doubt the sword I see is well balanced.
So you can model a sword from scratch without references images, it just depends on your imagination. Look at the Cloud Strife’s sword, it isnt real at all.
The lighting is not the main problem here. You lited it from above, it’s a choice. The main part you have to work are the textures.
You said that you saw the Adrew Price tutrial on realistic materials, that’s good. That tutorial is a killer one for begginers, I began with it too and helped me to understand basics material. In general almost every metrial have bumps and normal maps even if its very subtle but you can get without it in that case if the sowrd is very new.
The material you used looks like brushed aluminium. I would have shosen another but it could work.
Just set the glossiness of your metal witha lower roughness, maybe set the mixshader factor to more than 0.5. You’ll get a more reflective metal. Do the same with “la guarde”.
Are you sure you want to use a wooden handle ?? I don’t see it as wood from here. Maybe try a different type of UV unwrapp. Try follow path or smart UV project. Try to use map nodes to control you’re UV unwrapping in the node editor.
If you want to go further than you can think and ingform yourself on the techniques that were used or are used nowadays fo making a sword, the marks you can find on the blade due to the “damasquinage” or indsutrial tools. Is it new or is used ?? has it been exposed to rust?? can steel even rust (that’s a personal question) ?? a mix of steel and iron certainly could. All those question may help you to reach a better look.
Actually, I did use a reference. This is the reference I used. It’s just that I didn’t want to create a completely identical copy (I also couldn’t, because I messed the mirror modifier). I know the image is flawed, though I’d rather make 5 flawed images and learn from them than make 1 flawed image and spend all the time correcting it. Also, I am attaching the node setup I used for the handle and for the blade.
What other good tutorials are there on texturing? Covering unwrapping and whatnot. Also, how could I make the wooden handle seem more wooden? Or what else could I use for the handle?
Also, what do you mean by: “The sword doesn’t look balanced?” You mean the model doesn’t look symmetric or that the weight of the sword doesn’t seem well dispersed?
For the texturing problem: What kind of environment map are you using? In order for reflections to work, you need to have something to reflect (i.e. a few basic lamps won’t show much reflection at all). HDR images will give you much better results than a simple 3-point light setup.
Actually, I didn’t even use an HDRi. I got Shiodome Stairs from [/url=http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html]here and put it into the scene. I also scaled the sword on the Z axis. As far as lighting goes, how did I do?
the whole model looks just a bit to smooth, try to make some sharp edges with ctrl+E and mark sharp.
if you use cycles for the textures you can take the colour output of the texture and link it in the displacement input of the Material output, with that you can create very easy bumpy textures
and for the renderengine use cycles if you dont use it already.
As Jeroe said, the model looks to smooth, be sure your topology is good, and try to add loopcuts where you want to mark seams. If you want to have more realism, also use Cycles, for an easier job, do a basic lightning, apply your textures, and try using some displacement maps, which will help you a lot concerning realism.
Hope I helped you,
Martin Teillet
