Study Task 1.2 - Modelling Skills- Do It Yourself

So I was feeling pretty nervous when I finally started on this (At least it wasn't the shark one though...), unlike the truck model, I was on my own with this one and had to start from scratch… though I suppose the post title already hinted you on that.

Anyway I just couldn't resist attempting to model an awesome weapon, at the end of this post, I am sure some gamers might be able to recognise whose halberd this was based on… So right, obviously I started off on the easier parts, that being the stuff and little 'ornaments' on both ends, before finally starting on the blade itself.

A little bevelling here...

A little extruding there (My first time trying it too)…

Initially the shape of the blade was going to be a lot more complicated (Like the one I had drawn in my concepts), but in the end, I decided to simplify it, especially after going through the pain or adjusting the edges to be sharper and attempting the blend other polygon shapes into it to actually attach the blade to the staff.

After hours of trying to figure out the deformer bend tool...

The checkered texture is great for presenting something...

I wasted a lot of time trying to find a metal-looking shader for the blade, and couldn't decide between a leather shader and just a plain bling blinn shader for the rest of the staff, in the end I did mix them in, as well as used a ceramic shader for the blue bit at the bottom. Later on I found the metal hyper shader in the material section and just made do with it, none of the tutorials actually worked for me, perhaps this is due to who basic and flat the shape of the blade was, hence why there isn't much of a shine on it...

I then made sure that the prop would move together as one whole object for later use, instead of breaking into several levitating pieces whenever it was rotated. As expected, that happened a couple of times, it was only until I freeze transformed, deleted the history and regrouped everything did it finally cooperate with me. Again it was pretty scary as I might have to start all over again if I made a mistake and forgot to backspace in time.

I am still annoyed that I can't figure out how to arrange the groups in the outliner, right now there are a number of empty groups connected to the main group which I can't delete for obvious reasons… why can't the objects be arranged like layers???

When it was finally time to render (I might have to re-render this and the truck later on for the submission), I was shocked to see that the blade was missing… but only in some renderers, I was incredibly baffled over what had happened, and would look back and forth to see if my eyes weren't actually playing tricks on me or if I had accidentally used some invisible shader on it which is of course preposterous! Haha!

I wish I could have done a better job with the blade but oh well, next time I guess. 

 I'm still not entirely sure if this is the render wanted for the submission… hopefully it is.