Diavola Viola
Designing a stylized fantasy weapon

Intent

Goal

Software

Improve: Stylized design, Hand-painting textures.

A WoW-style, low-poly fantasy weapon.

3DS Max

Adobe Photoshop

Skills improved

  • Photoshop
  • Hand-Painting textures
  • Stylized design
  • 3DS Max
  • 3D low-poly modelling
  • 3D model unwrap
  • Silhouette design iteration
  • Non-destructive layer workflow in Photoshop

Stylized Design

The main goal of this small project was to improve on stylized design. This time, by creating a fantasy weapon in a low-poly World of Warcraft style. Along with that, I also wanted to improve on hand-painting textures, especially metals. Once again, I'd be using previous acquired techniques: Blending, layering, shading, ...
To present, I'd be showcasing it on Sketchfab, without any post-processing or AO. As a stretch goal, I wanted to add a tiny animation and create an emission map to create some glow; however, this was going to depend on the available time.

Silhouette Design

To start this project, I once again took to the web for the good old reference. What I mainly needed was how medieval weapon parts were connected together. Once I studied up on reference, I started creating tons of monotone silhouettes. A good silhouette is the base for a great design.
I chose a few of the good silhouettes, and started detailing them into various iterations. From those, I chose 3 variants and created a more finished sketch of them.
I eventually selected the whip because I had more motivation to create that type of weapon. One more detailed sideview sketch, and I was ready to start modelling.

Creating the model

Using a low-poly workflow, I created the standard mesh quickly by using the sideview sketch I had, combined with using my brain to visualize how it looked in perspective. Once I created the base mesh, I needed to ensure maximum optimization to polycount. I created 3 meshes: the stock, the cracker, and a chain link.

Colours

I tried something different than Photoshop-iterating the colours. I used the mesh and applied simple colour materials to them. Faster than Photoshop, but less clear when comparing.

Hand painting the texture

Hand painting the textures was again going to be the hardest part. This time it was going to be more difficult due to it being a smaller model, and it having a lot of different metals. This correlated to having to paint in tons of highlights and shadows, whilst also considering light scatter.
Following up on a metal-painting tutorial, I managed to achieve semi-realistic metal parts. To make the gold/steel stand out more, I decided to have the purple material be a more matte colour.

All that was left was to paint the red gems, the leather handle, and present the weapon on Sketchfab!