Sword of the creator progress #7 - Final product
Overall, I think i’m very happy with the final product here, especially considering my past experience with any modelling software is non existent. I learned all i know about modelling from this very production process and while the modeling on my prop is fairly simple within certain areas, I feel like the texture, bump mapping and animation still stand out.
I think the texture alone is quite honestly quite ugly on its own, especially when you look at the original texture PNG. Yet the intricate scratches and chips added by the bump mapping make the texture seem a lot more believable as bone and the overall stylized look is exactly what I was trying to get for the final render.
Texturing aside though, I think by far the most effective aspect of the final prop has to be the animation. In no way is it perfect, there are a few key frames which are unnatural and the whole look of a disembodied hand is just strange. However, for a first year and first ever attempt trying Maya or any 3D modelling whatsoever, I still think the animation is very fluid.
Throughout the swing and in general just how the hand holds and carries the sword, the overall weight is really believable. The way the hand uses the swords own weight and momentum to carry it into both the swings feels really natural, and after spending hours and hours on this process i’m glad the effort translates to final render.
The hardest part of the process was by far was the animation also, it simply felt like a very hostile and complicated process to get stuck into for total beginners and the amount of complexity you can go to is really intimidating. Working from imagination alone is near impossible so a reference is vital. Once I had said reference however, mapping out my key frames became a lot simpler and working from that step forward, the process sped up a great deal. Spending most of my time manipulating tangents on the graph editor, I worked by far the hardest trying to get a natural progression between these key frames and i’m very happy with my final product.
I do wish that I spent a little more time improving the base model and adding more detail within areas where the polygons are very visible, like the very center for example. Yet considering this modelling was done within the very early stages of my experience with Maya and there was little time to return to it during the more intensive later stages I think I can overlook it to appreciate what did work well.
Looking back over the whole module, I think the most stimulating session would be the animation session. Having the freedom to go out and find the information for ourselves actually helped me learn quite a lot. It was really useful to see just how many user created guides and tutorials there are out there, and just how easy to follow they are. In the future just knowing these resources exist is going to help me immensely whenever I get stuck and i’m confident ill find the answer i’m looking for.















