Game ready sword and asset

Modelling of a one-handed sword

For a school project about making game ready scene, I had to make a sword.
I decided to go for the sword of the character Uzui from the anime Demon Slayer.

I wanted to model the sword as if it would have been hand-crafted in a realistic way and trying to reach a realistic texturing.
I gave it the boastful name of “Kaminoken”.

First, I started to gather lot of references of the sword and took the ones that would help me to correctly build the shape of the sword.

And then, since the handle of the has huge similarities with katana, I decided to gather katana references to help me making the realistic modelling, texturing, and naming of each part process.

I put all these references linked together on a Miro board.

I started on Blender to blockout the sword as a one-handed sword with a mannequin to create coherent shapes, I made relative shapes based on the picture of one of the references.

The first blockout doesn’t perfectly match the picture because the first idea was to turn it into a 2-handed weapon, but I didn’t manage to get the correct shapes and blade’s thickness.

So I kept the one-handed reference for all the next steps.

Then I modelled a low poly version of the sword and tried to make a clean topology.
After getting done with the first model, I’ve unwrapped the UV.

The model has 7.262 triangles.

I tried to have most of the space for the blade, the guard, and the handle, because they will have a lot of details in their textures.

My next step was to make a high poly version to sculpt the sword and add more details to it.
I kept using Blender for that because in the short period of time I had to make this sword I preferred to use a software I know.
I used the Dyntopo in constant detail to add everything that was matching with my references.

I personally think I’ve failed to sculpt the blade; it doesn’t look sharp on some parts and seem a little too messy on the other edges.

Most of my sculpt time were dedicated to the handle, I wanted to replicate the layers of tissue that are intertwined to have this look we can see on katana’s handle.

And I did the same process for the guard and the little piece on the handle edge that usually have little engraved shapes.

Once both my low and high poly models were done, I switched to Substance Painter to start the texturing process: I baked my high poly on my low poly with the highest resolution possible and started to apply textures that would match my references.

When everything was done, I jumped on Unreal Engine 5 to make the render in various angle.
I’ve been working on the lighting to enhance the render, to try to make it as realist as possible, using multiple light sources to create interesting light reflections (I did not used any directional light).

I’ve also been working on post-processing to set the exposure and the light units into physical values and added a light cubemap setting based on a bright interior HDRI and used the CineCamera to be able to have a modular depth of field for my renders.

Then I’ve made HD render using the Movie Render Queue for various angle and a few commands to enhance the quality.

Then I wanted to try to do post-production on Photoshop by tweaking the colours to enhance my main render.

About the other game assets

This entry is way too long than I've expected so I'll be short on that one.
The project we had to do was a scene with game ready assets, around the concept art of the Caravan Shop by Neil Richards.

I made all my asset on Blender and textured them with substance painter, with the same process I've made the sword above, but without the sculpt part.

The caravan has 82.142 triangles.

I changed the scale and proportion of the caravan because I wanted to adapt it for a special character: A walking cat.

I'm not experienced to make character without huge assistance of software, but I wanted to try hard one from scratch based on a "Felyne" reference from the game Monster Hunter.

My main reference was this 3D model picture taken from the sketchfab model.

And this is the result I got.
I wanted to go for a fur all around the body based on planes and fur textures with alpha, but the render wasn't good enough, so I've chosen to not add it.

The cat has 8.148 triangles.

This is how it look with the fur, and it has around 34.000 planes.

To end this entry, I will show you the final render I've made of the scene.
The first one had lot of issue because of the trees that wasn't "good enough", they had too many leaves which making the GPU going crazy when I was trying to do raytracing of the shadows, and this was leading the GPU to crash and fail any HD renders.

Thank you for watching my entry.

Have a wonderful day, Niels.