Viking-Age Sword
This project started as an exercise to improve my painting skills. It was indeed the first project I did using Mari as texture painting environment.
The goal was to recreate an archeological artifact in CG: a sword from the viking age. I wanted it to be a photorealistic work, but I have to say that at some point it shifted to a "gamy-looking" work. I think that I overdid the textures, but it was great fun! First I looked for photo references in order to get some ideas about the sword and the environment I could place it into. Since it was a texture painting project, I did not want to spend time on modeling so I looked for free sword models on the internet and found one that was quite nice. Using Maya I reshaped it a little bit, changed the proportions, did a different hilt and unwrapped all UVs. Because Mari does not necessarily need good unwrappings, I used automatic and simple projections. This way I quickly obtained UV sets for every part of the sword (blade, guards, hilt, pommel).
After that I exported an OBJ and began the texturing in Mari. I started by laying down the bump channel, shaping the main iron core and layering on it carved patterns, incrustations and dirt. I used a lot of procedural layers and painted by hand only their masks, caching them when the project was getting too complex and slow.
For the main color channel I copied the bump channel, used it as basis and added color variations using procedural layers once again. Then I did the same for the specular and glossiness channels. After some time I finished my textures: bump, diffuse, specular and glossiness textures (4k resolution) for each part of the sword. I also created some simple masks to be used later in layered materials (mainly the pommel and the hilt materials). Finally I used Octane to create the shading network and rendered a couple of images using some HDRs I did with HDRLightStudio. I also added some emissive geometry to get better specular reflections. I used quite a lot of nodes to get the layered materials I needed. Once again I used procedural devices to get even more unique patterns and "infinite" resolution. I also added some objects to create a museum case to place the sword inside. The Octane project got quite complex and required almost 2GB of VRAM, but it was still interactive on my NVIDIA Quadro K3000M.
Render network in Octane: the most complex materials have been collapsed in macros
Then I rendered some passes (beauty, depth, material ids, etc) and put them in Photoshop. So I did the final compositing and color correction, decreasing the saturation and leveling the colors for each material.
I'm quite happy of this first texture painting project using Mari. I don't think I will ever get back to Photoshop when texturing 3D objects. I'd like to get some more photorealistic renderings out of Octane, maybe working on a better environment and HDR background. Time for another project? :)
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Project Recap
Archeo-Artifact Recap
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Final Composites
For those of you who are interested, the label next to the sword reads:
Sword, pattern welded, core made of springy iron and edge of hard steel. Pommel made of iron to counterweight the blade. Mammen style pattern. 93 x 11 cm. Burgus Sancti Dalmacii, discovered in the ancient abbey garden in october 2013. Viking age artifact, 1100?
AN 2013 1.1v
Sword, pattern welded, core made of springy iron and edge of hard steel. Pommel made of iron to counterweight the blade. Mammen style pattern. 93 x 11 cm. Burgus Sancti Dalmacii, discovered in the ancient abbey garden in october 2013. Viking age artifact, 1100?
AN 2013 1.1v