The blade should be a breeze as well, don't let its look scare you
as its quite simple. The first thing we are going to do is an outline
of the upper portion of the blade. Starting at the ricasso, where
the blade starts unsharpened. When drawing the outline, exclude
the edges on the blade. Take a look at this example:
Complete a side of it, and mirror to the other side
as an instance. Now using the original spline, draw the edges we
skipped. Here's what my final result looked like:
Another flaw I never fixed in my sword (which I knew
something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it) was the small
edge just below the ricasso.
See my error? Look at the blade reference. I need
another vertex there otherwise it wouldn't be sharp at all. Add
a vertex in there after studying the reference to know where I mean.
Now we need to give the sword depth. Select the edge and lower it
to whatever amount your content with. Correct some of the splines
that go a bit odd, if any.
Now's the time to connect both sides and make it a
single piece. Do the necessary fusing/welding
to ensure its all good for when it comes around to surfacing it.
 
Getting ready for the surfacing, start patching up
the sword like I have. Apply a surface modifier
to and fix any problems. Once fixed, it should resemble this picture
below:
Mirror the surfaced blade
as an instance and line it up with
the original. Notice we still have lots to do, but the blade part
should look complete and flush with the instance. The part where
I was talking about the one extra vertex I missed, you can see why
we need that in the first edge after the ricasso. This picture doesn't
have that as it is the mesh from an old file and thus has the flaw.
Also my blade here is somewhat too thick, I changed this around
later on incase your wondering.
Next attach both splines, top and bottom. The long
edged section of the blade is fine but we have all the gaps in the
unsharpened areas. Once together you have to connect the verts of
the top unsharpened part to the bottom unsharpened part so it will
surface.
Here's a few of the many verts you will need to put
a line across. Go along the sides and join up the two swords where
its unsharpened and has the gap in between in the picture showing
the two surfaced sides. When done take a look at it with the surface
modifier active to make sure there are no flaws. If you get a bunch
of ugly lines going across the surface like the picture below, check
"Remove interior patches"
on the surface modifier.
The picture above is what it should look like by now.
A complete blade with no gaps or holes in the surface. This picture
is from my actual sword awhile back, the flaw on the first edge
is noticeable here. Its also been meshsmoothed once. Here's a picture
of an old WIP render for the blade with a slapped on material (thickness
unadjusted):
Decide how many path topology steps you want because
were done here. I used a higher number than before because it will
not look good with a low number and meshsmooth if you plan to meshsmooth
it later on. Although I used a meshsmooth in the above picture example
I recommend not meshsmoothing it because of how the blade was made.
There's one more thing to do before completion. You
might notice some places where it twists and turns near the edges
have an ugly dark rippling effect.
This is because of the smoothing groups. Make sure
your content with the blade before we go onto this next step. Convert
the blade to an editable mesh by right clicking on it in a viewport
and use Convert To... Apply a smooth
modifier (under the modifiers tab)
and deselect auto smooth. The black ugly splotches and certain areas
should look better, but... now we got no smoothing! Oh no! Whatever
you do, don't meshsmooth. Meshsmoothing will help make it look better,
but essentially its just covering it up and adding unwanted faces.
Our task now is to put groups of faces into different
smoothing groups so it looks a whole
lot better. Take a peek at the reference and examine the blade.
Look at the ricasso then work your way down on the flat surface
with your eyes. That's going to be a group right there, excluding
the edges and sides. The next group will consist of the faces that
make up the sharp edge, they look somewhat darker from the way they
reflect the light in the reference picture. The last group will
be the unsharpened edged which you can't see from the reference.
Putting them into separate smoothing groups will eliminate those
ugly splotches. To do this, we will convert the blade to an editable
patch (Right click => Convert to... =>
Editable Patch).
*I have noticed (thanks
to a visitor) that I have done something wrong here. I don’t
have time at the moment to fix this, but you are not supposed to
convert the object to an editable patch when it’s already
an editable mesh. Delete the editable mesh modifier and add an editable
patch modifier. I will double check to see if this is right when
I get time this weekend!*
Converting it to an editable patch will make it easier
for us to put everything into the right smoothing group. Once the
blade is an editable patch, in the modify toolbox under Surface
you will see this:
The View Steps is
the number of subdivisions it goes through in the viewport display.
Raise the value and lower the value to understand what it's doing.
It's nothing different from Path Topology when we surface splines.
Render Steps is, you guessed
it, how it shows up in renders. To make it easy for us to select
parts of the sword for smoothing groups drop the view steps to 0.
Your sword should look blocky. Get into patch subobject mode and
select all the faces of the flat part of the blade. Here's mine:
I recommend using the top viewport and holding down
CTRL while using drag selects. Problems can occur when using the
viewport, using this method also selects both sides at once. Make
sure your drag selects never go over the edge of the blade in the
top viewport near the ricasso, if you do you've selected the unsharpened
side or edge and we can't have that. Use ALT with a drag select
to deselect certain patches. When you've found them all scroll down
a bit in the modify toolbox to find the smoothing groups box. Deselect
the one and select two.
Every face is defaulted to a single smoothing
group (one), by deselecting one and selecting two we are
saying not to smooth with the edges or sides of the blade and to
smooth only itself. The perspective picture above is after I changed
the smoothing group, you should notice it looks somewhat cleaner
than before. Lets continue on to the edges of the blade.
Maximize the top viewport and use the drag select
to select the edges like I have here. See the spot where the big
edges end, close to the ricasso? Be careful of what you select there
to not to select the unsharpened side of the blade.
Here's a picture of how you should be selecting the
edges, use only the tip of the selection box to grab the edge in
the middle to ensure nothing else gets selected. Also, the flat
part of the blade we assigned to smoothing group 2 is not selected
in that picture, you can tell by the horizontal white lines. Once
you've selected the patches like I have in the picture, deselect
smoothing group 1, and assign smoothing group 3.
Now if we did this right, we don't need to spend time
selecting the smoothing group on the unsharpened edges near the
base/tang of the blade. Under the smoothing group options, click
Select by SG. You should have
3 smoothing groups, click group 1 and hit ok. The unsharpened sides
should light up. If you have problems with your groups, hit the
Clear All button and start over. It shouldn't take more
than 2 minutes so its no big loss.
Now you may up the viewport steps to see the blade
in more beauty and with no smoothing errors. There is still a couple
more tweaks I noticed that could be done that I never got around
to when making my blade. There STILL are a few smoothing errors
based around the unsharpened edges. Take a look:
Smoothing doesn't work right when it comes to tight
corners like those. The solution is to break it down into more groups.
I'll let you do that on your own, here's a picture of how the groups
should be if you get stuck:
The yellow part can be in the same smoothing group
as the blue I believe because it doesn't do much as they are not
connected together. Don't worry about the very bottom of the blade
as that won't show in the final product.
Now the smoothing should be perfect! We are done the
blade! Your sword should be looking very deadly so far. We have
one more piece to go, the pommel. This piece I am somewhat shaky
about to do because of the poor reference picture.
Head on over to the pommel,
the trickiest piece to model IMO |
