Horn-tied Sword
Sculpted in ZBrushed and then taken into 3DS Max for a quick retopology before being mapped in Substance Painter.
When looking for inspiration for 3D modelling, Artstation becomes invaluable. Especially with all the fantastic 2D artists and matte painters out there. I found Zach Sharts' collection of swords and decided it would be good practice to model straight from concept art. As you see below with the concept on the right and my model on the left, I tried to keep as close as I could to the original image regarding shape. As for texturing I decided take a slight tangent and go for a more hand painted/toon style technique.
The retopology got the model down to around 3000 tris as I tried to be as efficient as I could with the mesh. The biggest hindrance was the wraps around the horns as they took up a lot of polys.
They were also a bit of a pain when it came to baking the normals and AO maps as they were not giving me accurate results. I separated the models, baked them individually, merged the maps back together and it worked like a charm.
