Brandon Fuller Blender Project

For my blender project I decided to model a sword and arrow without a reference and see what I could come up with. Below is one view of the final project with a the backround banner from http://garyckarntzen.deviantart.com/art/House-Arryn-Sigil-Wallpaper-307912339. Below that will be intermediate steps of the project as well as a description of how I did it. After will be another final product picture with a description of what was hard and what helped me overcome this project.

The first thing I did was create the arrow. I started by making the head of the arrow by creating a cone and removing all vertical edges except for two as well as two short edges at the bottom of each. From these two I created a mid point vertex between them and created a few new edges. After that I deleted half of it, mirrored it along two axes to make the pointed blade. I filled in all the required locations with faces. This gave me the pointed arrowhead I wanted. I extruded a part of it down and then modeled the bottom part part that is wedged into by he shaft of the arrow. After finishing this I used subdivision of surfaces as well as adding new edges to reform the object to give it a smooth but sharp look. After which I made a cylinder on 64 vertices to act as my wooden shaft. Below is the product of this work.

After creating the head and the shaft of the arrow I created a cube and flattened it out, teadiously I cut the cube in to many pieces that could be reformed into the 'feather' of the arrow. After breaking it up into several pieces and modeling out the shape I applied subdivision of surfaces to smooth it out, and then added edges to reform the object, below is a picture of what the arrow looked like after adding the 'feather'.

After finishing the arrow I decided to set up part of the scene that I wished to create. I applied all modifers I had added and fused the arrow together (which in hindsight I should have waited till later which will be explained later). Then duplicated the arrow and started setting up my presentated image as below.

I then started working on the sword. I used a similar technique to create the swords blade as I did to make the arrow head, with a few modifications to make it look different (as it should). After I had created the tip of the blade I extruded it downward to make the blade. I added a few more details to the blade to make it look better. I then used subdivision of surfaces and added new edges to smooth and reform the object to make it look good. After finishing the blade I made the gaurd of the sword by making a cube, flattening it and then fitting it to the blade and then merge, translate and scale as needed to give it a unique gaurd look. To make the handle I created a cube and then used a trick (which I have already been using lots) by modifying it using subdivision of surfaces and then added new edges to give it a rounded look. Then I tediously created several loops cuts with equal spacing (three for each indenting) and scaled them all uniformly inwards to give it the handle look. I also added several loop cuts to and scaled the end of the cube to give make the butt of the handle. After that work I had ended up with what is below.

After finishing the sword I had added it to my scene as well as add a couple of lights.

Then I created a plane in the backround and added the texture of the picture from above in the link as well as add some stronger lights.

After getting to this point I was ready to start giving my models material / textures and decided that I wanted a reflection on the steel or gold parts and had added them using cycle rendering instead of blender rendering, doing this caused my backround plane to get messed around (as in the picture at the top). Also since I merged my arrow together I had to actually seperate it to give it different materials. Then I created a couple of lights and set up some cameras to get a couple of rendered images. After this I had rendered a couple of images (some which turned out poorly which I excluded, I think it had to do with the materials and textures and I wasn't able to make them look any nicer). Above was the final copy and below is also a rendering without the background that turned out how I wanted it to.

Conclusion

I learned a lot of interesting things when working on this project, a lot of which had to do with tricks to make things look better as well as the tools required in blender. I was inefficent at times but I felt like it didn't matter since this was a one time project, but after creating what I did I feel like I would like to play around with modeling some more for fun in the future. I would say the hardest parts were learning the tricks (subdivision of surfaces combined with creating more edges), learning the tools given in blender and coming up with an idea of what to actually create. Once I had an idea of what to create, it took me a couple of tutorials on the shortcuts and tricks and I was able to do the rest by myself.