Witcher swords

#1

Greetings all,
I wish to ask your opinion and critics on my latest little project.
Witcher swords scene link
It is a WIP, a decent render is yet to come. This one is just a realtime preview using Marmoset Toolbag.
What do you think of it so far? What advice would you give a rookie in rendering?
I’m not sending any textures as they do their job and you see how they work. Obviously I will have to do some magic with the shader setup in the primary 3D app I will use to render it out.

#2

Try to post the img here instead of sharing txt link to it

Good start. If I may I will advice you for realism

The swords need more work in there of modeling.

  • The Pommel of the Tor’haerne sword feel very very small versus the reference. Of course the ref I post is not the same sword, but the pommel should be bigger in general to give some balance to the sword itself.

  • I think you miss also some small bevels in the sharp corners to catch more Highlights.

  • As for the table the texture is you bumpy and big. It broke to scale of the scene to have a big grainy texture in relation with your sword.

  • As for Lighting, I would suggest stronger fall off and shadows. Base yourself on ref

  • Also the candle would need SSS. Currently the candles doesnt work for me because of that.

  • The Candle stand is not smooth enough. I can still see the polygons on the rim. But if you go realtime maybe we should expect seeing polygons

But In general, I like the scene and the composition. You just need to refine the sword and the candle

#3

Thanks for the update.
Yes, the pommel became a bit small - wanted to start texturing so bad I skipped the repair. Will tend to that as soon as I can.
Marmoset has no real time SSS or so I can imagine but yes, I will definitely add it to the final render, now it looks like plastic.
As for the sharp corners you mean some sort of ramp instead of a 90 degree right?
The table, first I tought it’s fine but yes it needs a bit less bumpiness, now it is like it was shaved or what.
I also plan to add some runes on the silver sword as texture and normal map, with some halos. Find it a decent idea?
The flame will be rendered in the primary 3d app I will render in. This one is just there because why not.
The swords, I wanted to subdivide them render time, this is the low poly version and the normal maps did not help that much.
Maybe I give up on supporting edge loops and use crease to smooth or just apply a subdiv before re UVing them so I UV a higher poly mesh.
Which method would you suggest to get nice and smooth meshes in the render? (no real time)
All in all, thanks again for your help, it comes in handy.

Another thing.
The lights - point light won’t do in rendering, right? Others suggested I might want to add some area lights to get the reflections, this scene has about 5 lights, the white reflections are small falloff point lights, the candle is a bigger falloff coloured point light and it has a HDRI (without it everything gets black).
Do you agree on them or you have something else on your mind?

#4

There is a good article on the Digital-tutors blog about What I suggest:
Bevel Deformer link

The table, first I tought it’s fine but yes it needs a bit less bumpiness, now it is like it was shaved or what.
I also plan to add some runes on the silver sword as texture and normal map, with some halos. Find it a decent idea?

Yah adding glyphs in glow can help… but also can break to composition. Try it in Photoshop quickly first, let see

#5

I will try a bit later for sure.
I will have to collect some images for the runes etc etc and night is coming here :smiley:

#6

I finally got to render the scene in Blender using Cycles.
The scene itself got more light - I experimented with using only the candle’s light but that did not give me the nice reflections that now I have. Furthermore it was way too dark to my liking.
I also did a smooth at rendertime and of course the mixed glossy and SSS shader for the candle is provided. The flame is a mental ray composite.
EDIT: no runes :confused: I was way too anxious to get started with rendering after my successful great go at calculus and computational theory that I forgot I wanted to add those.

#7

Yet another reply:
My bro insisted on my making a dark image as well. To his mind this looks way better. Henceforth I post it as well.

#8

Good improvement. I think the spec on the sword are a bit too much, but would need the reference to be sure

#9

tried my best, that’s for sure :smiley:
yes, there are a bit over exaggerated highlights, but for those I went in favour of stylishness at the expense of realism - after all they are witcher swords :smiley:
by the way, is the depth of field noticeable? I gave it a bit, those I did not want to overdo that one.
And of course as you see I replaced the two snakes - I did not like them anyway.
EDIT: overexaggerated highlights, I got them with a lot of weak lights. I have around 7 lights at the scene and of course a bounding box to make good use of GI.

#10

7 lights?!? way to much for that result. Try to start with 3 lights, best result are done with 3 lights sources.

If you lit a full scene I think 7 light would be the case but not that type of “small” scene

I also think your table texture is too big, It break the scale of the sword, look like they are smaller then they should be.

#11

Next time I will pay more attention to that wood scale, make a tileable texture maybe.
As for the 7 lights, I had 7 but just a bit later I realised I turned off some of them along the way.
So as for active lights, I have one as the candle, another smaller near the crossguards to give more highlights, and two weak area lights to the left and right, just to get rid of the black areas.
It is 4 then, but most of them are weak and have a little attenuation radius. The only one that has a big effect is the sphere light representing the candle.

#12

Could you share a screenshot of your scene? displaying the lightrig position?

#13

Here it is.
The big sphere is the candle light, the little one has a short attenuation radius and is there only to get a bit more highlights on the crossguards. The two area lights albeit big (compared to the scene), they are very weak. I placed them there to eliminate the black spots and to prevent losing information.

#14

Do you scale your scene with the actual mesurement of the real stuff. Like the sword could be 65 inches but is your scene scale the work at that mesurement. Some physical lights react well to actual real scale of a scene

#15

I did.
The steel longsword has a blade length of 110 cm (3 feet 7 inches) and I just eyeballed the grip and the crossguard to it.
The whole is around one and a half metres if I guess it right.
EDIT: the whole steel sword is 1,5 metres. The scene, I built it around the swords.