The Written Sword of the Textura Troupe
A simple sword render with some animation based on the wonderful work of Mark Usmiani.
This is my first start to finish project that included a render, so I'm super pleased with how it came out. It's based on one of Mark Usmiani's wonderful vector swords, The Written Sword of the Textura Troupe. There's a video version below but I'll run through the processes I used in case anyone is interested. Created in Blender, with a pair of textures created in Affinity Designer.
The blade is a bunch of poly cards, kinda like how you'd do foliage for a game, but unified into one item with a shared UV that is then mapped on to a roughly 2k x 7k texture, which you can also find below. The UVs for the blade are then animated using Blender's AnimAll plugin to move down over the bright line, before being jumped back up to the start in a single frame, creating a shine effect on the blade that can easily be moved around and manipulated by copying a set of 3 key frames.
The pommel, grip, and guard are all mostly individual pieces. Those pieces all share a material with a swatch texture, a technique I learned from a blog post by Polygon Treehouse, the developers of the game Roki. Because the swatch texture is nothing but pure color, it doesn't have to be very big to avoid pixelation and UVing the model is as simple as scaling stuff and placing it onto the color. About as pain free as that process could possibly be.
The rest of the details are pretty straightforward. The gem is part of the blade model so it gets the glint. I'm mediocre lighting stuff at best, because I've never done it before. But this is four lights in a 3 point setup. I added another light with the primary fill light to make sure the blade was better lit. The glass for the vial at the bottom is the classic inside out normal trick with a light blue emissive material to match the reference and prevent it from taking shadows from the object inside it.
Think that about covers it. On to the video.
Below are the two textures used for this project, which were extremely simple to throw together in Affinity Designer.
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