It’s no secret that I’ve had help from a fellow student, Shane Pengelly, with programming my FMP. To return the favour we wrote up a contract between ourselves, the contract detailed that I would design any of the weapons and assets requested by Shane and in return he would continue to help me programme my FMP.
The asset that I was commissioned to create was a throwing axe that can be thrown by the player in his game. I started out by looking at other throwing weapons, such as: tomahawks, Steilhandgranate (M24 stick grenade), throwing knives, etc. After looking into the shapes of throwing weapons I asked Shane what style he wanted the piece in, he told me he wanted it to have to look stylised, having a Tolkien-like design, with realistic textures. So I drew up a few rough designs and asked Shane to pick his favourite.
With Shane’s design chosen I drew up a couple of different variations.
And then set to work with the model. For the modelling process I used 3DS Max to get the low poly model ready first, adding all of the necessary details. Once I was happy with the shape I took the model into ZBrush to get a high poly model to more accurately bake the textures in Substance Painter later, Shane told me he wanted the model to have hand drawn normal maps in the wood grain, so I decided to sculpt them in with ZBrush.
Once I was happy with the sculpted model I took the low poly model into Substance Painter 2 and used the sculpted model to bake the wood grain details, ambient occlusion, and curvature details onto the textures of the low poly model. With the texturing process I used custom alpha maps created in photoshop to add the engraving details found on the hilt and the head of the axe.
Below are the final renders.
The biggest difference from the chosen design is the lack of a bend in the handle, I chose to remove this because throwing weapons don’t tend to have warped shapes as it affects the flight through the air; I made sure to get the ok from Shane before making this choice.
RETS96 Creative Development 