This week we moved on from modelling to focus on UV mapping and texturing.
To start, we learnt how to import images as textures and the basics of adjusting the textures which is basically all we needed to know from the die and the can of coke. The hammer was harder but I understood it pretty well, following the demonstration. There were more adjustments needed for the UV map and we used an external program to texture it (I used Krita).
The homework this week was to model a sword without a tutorial, using what we learnt and applying them. I didn’t want to do something too complicated in case I start having trouble midway so I decided to model Stocking’s katana from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and if I didn’t find it too hard I could always tweak the design a little bit and add more on.
Starting off, I gathered references to use while modelling.
I began with a flat plane, using the knife tool to carve out the blade of the katana and then insetting faces along the edges to create quads. Then I went back t0 the knife tool to work on the topology (and carved the sword pattern as well), making sure it’s mostly quads. I also extruded the plane along the z-axis to give it some dimension and bevelled the edges to make so that it’s not too sharp. I gave the sword a little outline because I thought it fitted in well with the cartoonish look.
Next I worked on the guard which was modelled from a cube that was shaped with a lot of loop cuts and the proportional editing tool (with the sphere setting for the rounded bump). While extruding some extra details, insetting and bevelling the edges, there were some extra edges that appeared when I was modelling (which you can see in the picture below) so to fix this I merged the vertices at centre for the areas it was affected and that got rid of all the extra edges.
Lastly, I modelled the grip handle which was also just a cube that was scaled to size with loop cuts and bevelled edges. I carved the diamond shapes with a knife and extruded inwards to create a sense of depth. Also for the diamond pattern specifically, I made the material transparent because I thought it looked cool and added something different.
As props, I made a couple glass butterflies using a sphere mesh and a knife-tool-carved plane with the mirror and solidify modifier.
Moving on to UV mapping, I struggled a bit with this as I had forgotten some of the steps so I had to look back on the previous tutorials. After marking my seams I unwrapping everything and organized the sections by how it was going to look in Krita.
I had difficulty deciding what texture to use for the sword because I couldn’t really tell through the references so I just settled on metal. In Krita, I messed around with the colours a bit until I was happy with it and imported it back into Blender.
And here’s the final model! I messed around with the lighting a little which was a little weird because it took a while moving around the lights to make the sword appear not too bright or dark.
I did an optional task of animating the homework so with what I learnt from last week’s Zubat animation, I did something similar with the butterflies. I originally had a cyclic modifier added to the wings but couldn’t figured out how to slow it down near the end of the animations so instead I manually copy and pasted the keyframes and adjusted to my liking.
Final Animation
It was interesting making this without a step-by step guide. Definitely had to try to think of a lot of ways to fix problems and checking everything was okay a hundred things.