Just finished this today after going through a great
tutorial at http://simplymaya.co.uk
This is the first thing I've gone all the way through texturing, lighting, and rendering, so go easy on me.
Here it is:
Any helpful comments would be appreciated.
Cheers,
-michael
I like it.
Some thoughts.
The blade looks very weathered which is good; except the coloring of it doesn't seem to reflect that.
A bump map on the hilt I think would add something to it.
And of course on the guards you might want to make the corners a little less round.
For a first attempt this is good work. Now the question is what kind of look are you going for? Total photorealism? Hyper-realism, a bit illustrative? You get the idea. If you want specific help then we need a bit more of an idea about what you're trying to achieve. One thing I would point out on a technical level is that you need to increase the tesselation of the blade. Those hard corners are the result of Maya not dividing the NURBS surface into enough polys at render time. If you open the attribute editor for the blade shape you'll find tesselation parameters. Try increasing them till it looks smooth. I'd also look at your lighting as well; at the moment it's rather flat. I've written a tutorial on basic 3 point lighting at www.andrew-whitehurst.net/3point.html which might prove helpful. Good work. Keep it up.
Andrew
also another trick to make two pieces of geo look like one (i.e. blade and handle) is instead of just sticking it in there, find a way to make it look connected. add sauter, or an indentation in the handle where the blade enters it. this always makes a huge difference.