FMP: Level Design... a sword

Last night I made a sword.  The sword is based on the wanderer's sword in Shadow of the colossus, but with a bit of a Greek/Roman feel.  In The Shadow of The Colossus the sword is named "Sword of the Ancients".  This sword will become a focal plot element - Used as a tool to trigger and resolve events.  I was thinking of having a "Sword in the Stone/Excalibur" type feel, having a nice scene where the sword is inviting you to retrieve it.  This will trigger the awakening of the Colossus and then be a tool to activate other triggers to help defeat the boss/colossus.

The shape of the blade is similar to Iron age Celtic blades and the Greek Hoplite - With a leaf shaped two edged blade.  The Sword of the Ancients is exaggerated with the tapering occuring much closer to the tip - This contradicts the swords use in the game Shadow of the Colossus - as in reality the shape is used to aid swinging and not thrusting.

I made this in 3DS Max & Zbrush - Single pass render from Zbrush

I was having a go at using the Multi-Map Exporter in Zbrush - You can change settings here to project & export maps from multiple objects (or sub-tools in Zlanguage) and also to flip the vertical axis and green channel to match 3DS Max.  This is a big time saver, and combined with being able to fluidly push 30 million triangles about makes it pretty useful for high definition textures and speed sculpts alike.

I did a little more work on the sowrd - Giving it two distinctive sides - The Sun and the Moon

Optimization

I'm actually spending the day today working on this - Texturing and optimizing at the mo.  There is a handy script called ubervert count - which analyses the mesh and its UVs and normals even.  You should convert your mesh into an editable mesh (from editable poly) first to save time.  It seems the optimal way to model is with a single smoothing group, weighted normals (to prevent bi-normals and unwanted doubling vertex information).  also if the UV seams match up with geometry seams this seems better - Giving you the chance to get 100% optimization.  This can be confusing as by using multiple smoothing groups you need to split the normals to create the separate groups - End of the day it is all personal choice, smoothing groups seem more redundant the more polys you use.  Anyways - I'm aiming for 80% plus and don't want to cut the geometry up ilogically just to accomadate seams.

I made an incosistancy going between 3dS & Zbrush - I was lazy and forget to fix the subdivion levels - You can only really tell on the tip of the blade here with the oval/distorted Sun symbol and the grip (I can tell on the grip anyways)

It's an idea to split your objects into smaller objects/materials within Marmoest - Here I allocated one material (giving my leather grip a "metal" feel.  I guess you could use masking maps an layer the materials - Maybe laters

I spent a bit of time with Marmoset & After Effects - Trying to get decent materials to work in a PBR environment, pressing all the buttons and playing with the setting in Marmoset in Particular.  I might alter and improve the design (and model) to accomodate for level interaction - But is an idea not to spend too long on one thing - I'll get it in the level and see what needs done