Self-Critique

Overall I felt that my work mostly satisfied my expectation in terms of modeling and in terms  of the framework, however I find the texturing a great deal to be desired, although this is not altogether unexpected as I did foresee this in my initial planning. However overall I am satisfied with my work.

General Appearance

In terms of general appearance I feel that my model was extremely similar to that of the actual object. Especially in terms of the hand-guard of the sword as well as the hilt of the sword, I felt that I have done especially well in modeling these two parts of the sword.

The spaces between each of the curves holes of the guard were taken into consideration as I modeled it with the help of the different view so as to ensure that it was as close to the real thing as possible.

The hilt of the sword was extremely challenging as it had a certain unique shape of both being curved & flat at the same time. Hence I took a long time trying to model that aspect however after various attempts I manage to come up with one that I was satisfied with by using a mixture of Booleans->Difference & Extrusion.

The sword blade itself which I made using a curve deformer was ok looking, although I find that at closer examination in a zoomed in mode that the curve of the blade is not all that smooth. However overall I am still satisfied with how it turned out.

However in terms of the other finer aspects of the wooden sword, which is to say the finer details such as the little bumps on the sword, where the wood joins & any other aspects where no clear modeling was needed but details that were to be shown through texturing was where I felt that I have done badly.

The inner layer of the hand-guard of the sword has a more complicated and layered texture compared to the outside layer. However I could not seem to find the correct texture for the inner layer & hence left it similar to the texture of the blade of the sword.

The hilt of the sword as well was not ideally what I would have wanted it to be though I did try to imitate it by applying a darker burned texture of the one I used for the blade of the sword.

Overall I felt that I should have researched more about texture rather than just simply using those provided in the lab exercises.

Progression & Research

I took a total of 2 weeks to finish my model as I started work on it on week 4. I took the first week to understand & do research on how to model the wooden sword. The second week I tried to do research & experiment on texturing but admittedly that was not as fruitful as I hoped for it to be.

PS: I have done my research here as well wish I would show as I progress through the project.

Week 1:

Hand Guard Making:

As stated above I did the hand guard of the sword in the first week (start of week 5), this was probably the only part of the model I was a hundred percent sure of how to model.

Basically what I did was to use the BooleanàDifference Tool to make the curve side of the guard. Just like what was done for the bucket in the lab exercises.

I used a CV curve tool & a Revolve tool to ensure that like the method shown in the tutorial, however I used a higher segment count when using the revolve tool to give it a more round edge. The reason I did this is because I wanted to ensure that the topology was correct.

(Using CV Curve Tool)

(After Revolving)

I was pleased to say that this went rather smoothly indeed. The only problems I face were the fact that since you could only difference two objects at one point. I had to make sure that each sphere that I had use in the difference tool was arranged equally inside the hand guard of the sword. I accomplished so by making use of the channel box as well as the top view to check the distance between each spheres.

(Using the Channel Box Editor & Top View to prepare for Boolean-->Difference)

(After using Boolean-->Difference)

Hilt Making:

This was probably the trickiest component I had to do for the sword modeling project, given that the hilt of the sword had a curve that faced outwards rather than just a simple straight line slope that most people would assume at first glance. Also the part where the hilt had a flat side only added to the difficulties I faced.

Initially I tried to use a method I thought will work as I was researching on how to make object appear smooth as I had to attempt to create the curve effect that the hilt of the sword had at the end of it. (I decided to use a square at this point as I felt that it was easier making a curve from a square-like object rather than making a flat point from a curve/smooth object)

Hence I tried to manipulate the face of the end of the cylinder as shown below before using a tool called Polygonal Smooth.

However upon applying the tool I realize that there were several problems with it. Firstly I feel this method had its limit while working on a square like object I cannot find a way to manipulate the object to become a perfect circle. Below was my best attempt at creating the hilt, as you can see I first made the square model out of a cube & by manipulating the faces and inserting new edges using the Insert Edge Loop Tool to the object you see below, then selecting specific faces & edges as I prepare to use the smooth tool on it.

(Before Smoothing Object View)

(After Smoothing Object View)

 

As shown in the 2 diagrams, even though it looks similar, the smooth edge tool can never be used perfectly on a square like object. Hence it was here I realize I should use a cylinder and try to make the flat edge via some method.

(A few days later)

After thinking long & hard, in which I was thinking about inserting new edges and manipulating vertexes similar to what I’ve done earlier on (which when involves a many edges and vertex object such as the cylinder is just hellish), I realize that actually the method I needed was very simple. I could simply use a Boolean difference to make both the curve & the flat face of the hilt. As shown below I first create a cylinder and then using a cube that is scaled accordingly, I arrange it in such as way that when I apply the difference tool, it could give me what I want.

(After using Boolean-->Difference Tool)

As seen in the diagram above, it’s a much more similar match to the actual object. However it does not accurately show the curve of the flat side which curves outwards. Hence I finish off by using an extrusion and slightly extrude a smaller version of the flat face.

(Using extrusion to bring out the curve)

 

Week 2:

I started work on the blade near the end of Week 5, though I would consider it Week 2 in the progress schedule already since it was only a few minutes before Sunday.

I consider the blade shape initially in week 4 to be a cube; however I was not faced with the difficulties of 2 things, making it curve appropriately as well as smoothing of the edges.

The first method that I wanted to try was manipulating of vertexes to imitate the curve of the blade as well as the smooth edge (This is a very painful task). At first I went to create a cube and scale it to size so that it will be close to that of the blade, also I made the cross section of edges so that I could manipulate the shape more easily.

(Manipulating Vertex to form sword edge)

I manipulated the sword shape via vertexes, which took freaking long!!! Hence as a result I took a very long time just to come up with the blade shape (with curve edges). However I still needed to make the blade curve rather it just being straight. I wasn’t going to manipulate vertexes again as I didn’t have enough time. Hence I decided to use a deformer curve tool to bend the blade (Similar to what I’ve done for the lab exercise where we had to make tracks).

Before I applied the deformer I used the smooth tool which I’ve discovered a few days ago on specific faces of the blade. This gave the blade a smoother feel to its edges. The below images are images where I was testing to see if the smooth tool will work & it did. Though at this stage I was not really done with manipulating the vertex just yet.

(Before Smoothing)

(After Smoothing)

Hence after I applied the deformer curve (had to spend some time getting the right setting by playing with the options in the deformeràBend Tool, options such as low & high bound as well as curvature to determine how curve the blade would be.) Below is an image of how the blade looks like once it had been bend. (I forgot to take a screen shot of how it looked like before it was bend, but from the above images where I manipulate the vertex, it was generally looked something like that.)

(After using Deformer-->Bend)

Now I simply put together the 3 pieces of the sword and texture it, I used a simple wooden texture that I found online & using Photoshop adjusted it accordingly to fit the each pieces of the wooden sword accordingly. (Example the guard had a layer of darker wood & I tried to imitate that in my texture.)

I don’t have much screenshot of me doing the texture as I simply applied the file on a lambert type material and rotate the UVs until it looked ok. At this point I was in a rather rush for time hence I didn’t use methods in Maya such as editing UVs or other Maya-based techniques to do the texture. Instead I edited outside of Maya environment using Photoshop hence in this aspect I felt that I have failed.

Never the less I felt that overall I did all right, the final image of the wooden sword is shown here below. Overall I felt that I had a better understanding of vertex manipulation after this project (especially since I literally spend a few days manipulating vertex while making the blade!!!). However I felt that even though I felt that I had a better understanding of which vertexes to manipulate to reach my ideal shape, I also know that there are better methods out there rather than doing it vertex by vertex as my method is non-practical in terms of time & efficiency.

(Finished Blade) :D