Our assignments to continue our practice for UV wrapping in blender and substance painter included designing and modelling our own sword, as well as a helmet of our choice.
For the sword design, I decided to reference Zoro’s Wado Ichimonji katana from One Piece.
This sword design is simple yet sleek, which I felt would be a good design to continue my UV mapping, as I was still not completely confident in my abilities to create and unwrap UV maps on models, and served as my introduction to Adobe Substance Painter, which is a very useful software which allows us to use more complex materials and textures on our designs.
I began the design by modelling the handle of the sword, attempting to replicate the white ribbon-bound structure with the gaps of black, before using the extrude feature to inset the gaps and outset the handle’s flare. Afterwards, I moved onto sculpting the blade, which I shaped from a cube mesh by flattening it before using the loop cut and knife tools to fashion sharp edges and pointy end.
As for the helmet assignment that we had to reference, I wanted to challenge myself through layering different meshes to create an almost reptilian, dragon-like style, so I decided to reference Hiccup’s riding helmet from How to Train your Dragon 2. This design of helmet is almost reminiscent of a beetle’s exoskeleton with the layers of leather at the back of the helmet to act as protection for the back of the wearer’s neck. To imitate this structure, I made use of the UV sphere mesh manipulated and cut into hemispheres before duplicating, rotating and layering them to achieve this multilayer effect. The structure of the front of the mask, which I also created using multiple UV spheres, was challenging for me to layer due to figuring out how to inset the seams on the edges of the leather around the mask as well as between the protruding spikes. Initially, I had thought of using the extrude tool to inset the seam, however the end result was rough and harsh, which led me to using the knife and loop cut tools before selecting the vertices and scaling the seam inward, creating a more realistic looking effect.
The part of this assignment which I struggled with the most was navigating and using substance painter for both the sword and helmet, mainly due to the shortcuts for moving the model were so different compared to what I was used to in Blender, however I was eventually able to overcome this and add the textures and materials to both props.
