For this week’s assignment we were given the change to have free reign on creating and UV mapping our own swords. As I’m not entirely confident in my abilities with blender yet I wanted to go with a pre-existing design, and hopefully feel brave enough to take on 3D modelling my own design at some stage.

The sword I wanted to recreate was the Sword of Light from Dragon Quest XI. The sword itself has interesting features, and with help from online sources and my own collective knowledge from doing previous set workshop tasks, I can create a close replica.

To begin I used a image of the sword and straightened it on the axis to use as a reference point for my model, making it none selectable to ensure it wouldn’t move during the process. I then added a plain, straightened its position and dissolved all corner vertices bar one and positioned this at the point of the sword. I outlined the sword with said vertices, pressed F shortcut to connect them and filled the sword with faces. As it wasn’t the same on each since I divided the two sides with the knife tool down the centre and deleted the right sided faces, applying the mirror modifier to ensure the sword was symmetrical.

Selected the swords faces, extruded forward and added a loop cut on the side of the sword. I tried scaling outward however there was an area that turned black when attempting this. I went back and tried to correct the geometry on the faces and, instead of scaling, bevelled the edge. This worked a lot better for the shape of my sword and fixed any previous issues.

There was an issue when I shaded smooth, I looked up another sword tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UK-g9j3S0Q to see what the underlying issue was as I wanted perfect symmetry on both sides. Found the only issue when the inner faces that connected the middle wasn’t deleted, so the edges went seamlessly connecting. I deleted the inner faces, and the issue was resolved.

I had forgotten to add the circular parts to the blade, I formed edge loops and alterations using the knife tool. I messed around with the proportional tool until I was happy with the result/it was close enough to the original source material.

I proceeded to form the shape of the golden accents, drawing the shape with the knife tool and extruding outside, deleting inner faces to ensure smooth effect. I also turned on auto-smooth to ensure a valid balance between shape and smooth edges.

Forming the gold accent, I wanted to ensure the shape was accurate, so I used a Bezier curve and switched between automatic and vector to alter the shapes. I changed the thickness every so often to see if the shape I was forming was correct.

Forming the gem: I added a sphere mesh, scaled it down, selected the inner faces then extruded them inward. I sized down another sphere and positioned it in the middle. I then used this as a placeholder to model the surrounding parts of the gold accents.

Creating the shape using the knife tool.

I didn’t end up using this method as the inner sections appeared to have a solid connection, so I clipped the tube through the shapes which seemed to work better.

Adding details: had to keep setting origin to 3D object for the mirror modifier to take effect. I used the right hand side to ensure the lines were tidy.

Took edges of the curves after turning into mesh and merged at centre and bevel while additionally deleting inner faces.

Copy and pasted diamond shapes, selecting the top vertices and merging at centre to create a point and altering them to form a diamond. Adjusted them accordingly to fit inside the frame.

There was a gap point when applying the mirror, I selected both sides and filled the gap with “F” shortcut.

Finished model. Time to UV map!

Beginning of UV map implementation, as followed from tutorials. (Before and after, allows me to visibly see the shape of my sword. Compared to previous default.)

Note: As I was UV mapping I had forgotten to apply my scales before moving forward, I went back to apply these so they wouldn’t cause issues when moving on.

Added seams, unwrapped and organizing UV Map arrangement. I ordered the items by material so when applying in my editing software it will apply the material to the correct areas.

I attempted to use Krita, however this program was very new to me and I wasn’t too familiar with the layout. Due to time constraints I wanted to try and use Procreate, my usual drawing software, to order and apply my textures since it had transparent imagery support. It had very similar tools and after uploading and applying my finished UV map to the software I was able to transform and import my textures from google and apply to my sword. Use UV import file as reference to where they would appear in the Blender software.

When applying the UV map I found that when slicing my sword in half with marking seams it would split the image on the object, having a clear divide of the different texture. I didn’t like this outcome, going back to my model and deleting seams to ensure that the cross sections looked seamless. Having to unwrap these areas again made the final result of my UV map untidy. If I had the time I would rearrange the items to get a cleaner result.

Another change would be ensuring the separate objects would be parented together to form one object, alongside creating an animation for my sword. However as this was an ambitious design I had no time to add these changes. I was able to include a simple HDR backdrop that would be a similar environment to the game (sources from polyhaven) and upload an image as a plane to hold the sword at an angle (google images.) And with that my sword was complete. Despite not adding the finishing touches I adore how the sword came out. I was set out to challenge myself from practising with the tools up to this stage and wouldn’t think I could achieve something like this at this stage. I’m excited to branch out and see what models I can create in the future with the knowledge of UV mapping!