Long time no see.
January is the month of exams and stuff for most of students, and since I'm one myself, I'm pretty busy.
The fact that, if I ware a Power Ranger, my Zord would be a sloth, doesn't seem to help, either.
Any ways, I wasn't totally unproductive. I sat my ass in front of Blender (the 3d program, not the one from kitchen...), saw few tutorials, and made the use of them.
I based work-flow on one tutorial, made by Lance Wilkinson, and kinda ripped of the vibe of weapon. I mean I made everything by myself, but the process is the same, and look of it is similar, although my dagger is a bit "darker".
1. Concept of dagger drew myself. It's easier than I thought.
2. Then I sculpted it in Blender.
It has 204 vertices, 240 faces and 404 tris, so it's low polygonal mesh.
Why I went for the low-poly model?
Every object that you see in games, consists of faces and vertices. Lets say we've got simple cube. Six faces, 8 vertices - it seems like nothing. It's not that simple. Computer doesn't know if that faces are attached to the other, so it makes (6 faces)*(4 vertices for each face) == 24 vertices.
Still nothing? Remember that our cube has to exist in the 3 dimensional space - if not, It wouldn't be a cube. That means Every vertex has XYZ axis data. (24 vertices)*(3 axis)= 72 numbers describing the position in world. I forgot to mention that the world position has to be in some kind of relation to these vertices, every vertex has triplet of variables (or quartet when it comes to visibility) describing RGB color (orRGBa) in vertex shader, triplet (quartet) that describes color that radiates from vertex on the face it's attached to, and so on, and on, and on... and it's still a simple cube.
The point is: The more vertices/faces you got, the bigger shitload of data your computer has to compute.
In modern games programmers and 3d artists are using lots and lots of tricks to fool our eyes, to believe that something is prettier than it is in real.
3. Exported UVs layout (that spider-web thingy for these who don't know) as *.png file, and started to draw on top of them.
4. After few iterations I ended up with blade like this.
5. At the end added some details and dirt to make it look more used.
The final texture looks like this:
and has 1024x1024 pixels. For that low-poly mesh it's already overkill in my opinion.
You can easily notice how flat the surface is. Originally I indented to create normal map for that dagger, but that would require high-poly mesh, or at least few hours of playing with texture baking... and since it's a low-poly mesh, and that hand painted texture already gives the illusion of depth, it would not be worth it.
Wait! What the hell is that "Normal map" Well... that creates the illusion of bumpiness on flat surfaces. You can find more on wiki HERE.
And if you want to see Lance Wilkinson's tutorial you can buy them THERE. That costs 8 bucks for 4 hours long video tutorial (entire series), 3d meshes, and textures, so worth it.
So long
