Blender – Sword and Rocks
This was a quick thing mostly to play around with micropolygon displacement & grunge materials in Blender – but I ended up fiddling with it for a while, and learned a bit more about Cycles materials for particle systems.
The sword itself was modeled after a few images of German 14th-century longswords. I’m leaning fairly heavily on the subsurf modifier here, which is doing some odd things down the length of the blade – but nothing visible in a render, thankfully.
The sparks are a particle system where I’m using the Object Info node in the material settings to randomize the sparks’ blackbody temperature and emission strength a bit. The color variance isn’t a lot, but it added a surprising amount to the image.
There’s a few things on here that I could improve for realism – for one, the metal bands in the middle of the grip are just kinda there, without any gap or real edge between the metal and the leather. The interface between the crossguard and the sword blade is similarly perfect, because in the model I am allowing the blade and hilt geometry to intersect – a real sword would have a (small) gap where the blade’s tang fits into the hilt.
I might come back to this one in the future. Maybe add more stuff on the ground around the sword.
