Gear Sword

Hello everyone! In this entry I'm going to showcase my latest prop - a sword. It's based on the following concept by Sophie Morris, made for Swordtember 2022.

Concept Art

Final Result

Process Breakdown

I used Maya to create the blocking of the sword, since I found it easier to model the gears and the hilt here rather than sculpting them on ZBrush. I modeled each part individually in order to handle them better.

Once I was satisfied with the result, I moved over to ZBrush for sculpting and adding wear and damage. I used the Orb Brush Pack to achieve the look I desired. Then, I grouped my subtools keeping in mind the bakes, since I wanted to avoid any baking artifacts later. In addition, I used polypaint to separate my materials into different IDs to use them in Substance Painter.

Then, I moved back to Maya to do both the retopology and the UVs. I decided to reuse some parts of the blocking, adapting them to the new topology.

I did both the baking and the texturing inside Substance Painter, using a single 2K texture. Since I was aiming for a stylized look, I used the curvature map with a blur to highlight the edges.

Since the original concept had a sparke in the main gear, I recreated the effect inside Photoshop using a splatter brush on an alpha layer. Then, I quickly created a plane in Maya to put the sparkle in. Finally, I moved over to Marmoset Toolbag for rendering. I decided to set up a basic three-point lighting to illuminate the sword.

Turnaround

Marmoset Viewer