Week 4 (27/01/25)

This week was the fourth week of my Jian Sword project. The week has gone by fast and I have made substantial progress. I have finished the Guandao asset fully. I finished modelling it quicker than I thought I would and textured it just as quick. I'm unsure whether the speed increase is due to having more confidence on the subject, due to making the Jian sword, or the fact that I created my own smart materials, during the texturing process of the Jian sword, that helped streamline the assets production. Possibly both. 

Texturing the Guandao was fun and I learned some new things, which I implemented. I added some gold sections to the weapon and some etched details. I gave the pommel sharp blades as that end is sometimes used as a weapon. I kept the base metal similar to the Jian so they looked like they were made during the same time period, but I made it slightly more worn/rough as the Guandao is a warriors weapon. 

I learned about an important tool that can be used whilst texturing. These were anchor point. Anchor points are a very simple addition that helped bring the Guandao to the next level. For those that don't know (just like I didn't), anchor points allow you to add normal and height detail to things like generators in Substance Painter. This is important because to keep an asset low poly, and still look good, you need to bake the information from a high poly and/or add detail using textures on the normal and height layer. I kept the grip sections of the shaft flat because I planned to add the detail in Substance Painter but when I added the texture it looked awfully flat. I decided to look into other ways to include extra information to an asset using Substance Painter and that's when I came across anchor points. I added the information of the grip to the other layers and created a layer of ambient occlusion which improved the look of the grip. This also saved me a lot of time as normally I would manually paint in this information, this makes it hard to make adjustments and can take a long time to fix if I run into issues. Once I added the etching details and the signature lotus image, the Guandao was completed. Here is an image of the finished Guandao:

Once I finished the Guandao, I still had plenty of the week left so I decided to move straight to modelling the Tang Dao. So I end this week with having finished the Guandao and having modelled most of the Tang Dao.

My plan for next week is to finish the Tang Dao.