Weekly Drill - Survival Knife

    I started with a quick google search to find some cool examples of tactical knives. I didn't want anything too complex as I didn't want to spend every hour this week working on it.

    This knife has lots going for it, as it was a flip knife the final presentation could be shown with the blade both in and out. The metal clip on the back is an interesting shape that I haven't really tackled yet so I thought it would be fun to give it a go now. The braided chord hanging from the handle is also a feature I liked the look of.

    The actual knife itself wasn't too hard to model, it started off as a cube and the verts and lines were moved around to create the outline, it was then duplicated and I was left with the two parts with a gap in-between where the blade goes. 

    The dips in the handle were created with the quad draw tool and moving the verts into place to it looked alright. This did take a couple of attempts to get it to this stage, and it was frustrating.

    The model shown above was 4004 tris.

    For the chord I decided to attempt modelling string, modelling it wasn't hard, there is a really short and simple YouTube video which I followed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yncn9_y5ALU

    The string in the picture is probably the 6th attempt at it. There was so many issues with baking it, and getting all the detail to show through without it having loads of issues.  (if anyone has a good tutorial or any advice on modelling and baking string, it would really help XD) I was using the Ep curve tool to get the original path I wanted the string to go, this had its own issues, mainly with history and me not being able to edit its vertex's when I needed too.  I think there was just too much going on and it got too complex for me. i need to spend more time practicing using that tool.

    I chose to go with a smaller string and a charm on it, I thought this design was fitting.

    The model was baked and textured in substance painter, at a 4096 resolution. The textures were exported in the unreal engine 4 (packed) format, this is the format I am most familiar with using.

    The knife and Rookies charm are separate because I wanted to keep the choice of not including the charm for times when the knife will be lead down on its side, how I currently have it set up is to imitate the knife being stuck in something.

    And here is the final knife, I wanted to present it in both its forms, folded and unfolded. 

    This task has really improved my hard surface and my texturing skills. I really like how the rookies logo hanging from the knife turned out. Looking at it now, it would of been better if it was attached by those steel ball strings, like with dog tags, but I really haven't got the sanity left in me to model that right now.

    The complete model (including the hanging logo) comes to  4,936 tris, so pretty much 5k. I'm quite happy with that.

Folded knife.

Unfolded knife, and close up shots of the logo pendant and blade details.

I had a mview file prepared for this but am not able to upload it, so ill try figuring a way to get that added.

I'm also happy that this time I remembered to add a breakdown of my work :)