Barbarian Battle Axe

Please feel free to expand the images, since they are all rendered in high resolution.

3D Viewer, Wireframes, and UVs

General information:

- The mesh was triangulated prior to baking in marmoset to avoid unpredictable triangulation by game engines.
- Some UVs were mirrored, scaled up or down depending on visibility on screen, to give more important parts of the axe more resolution, i.e. the axe head.
- A single 4096x4096 texture was used for this axe.
- Occlusion, roughness and metallic maps were all packed into one texture to save on memory.
- 14650 tris, or 9294 tris without the chain.
- Mat cap and UV checker can be seen in the sketchfab viewer.
- Concept done by myself.
- The tree stump is from quixel megascans.

What I learned: 

- Sometimes less is more, initially I had problems with the metal surfaces because I didn't use enough reference and just scattered dirt all over, after I've gathered reference and made sure to match it, the metal started looking more believable. 
- Skew-painting using marmoset toolbag
- A proper workflow including the more technical details such as triangulating before baking, skew painting, and reducing vert count.
- Lighting a prop was hard work for me, since I had no clue how to make it look interesting. Ultimately I think I succeeded though.