The blade: I made a profile of the blade with three splines, and then a green cross section of the blade in the middle. I then copied the cross section and changed those to fit the three splines. There’s a Spline/Patch CrossSection and Surface on top. With the red splines guiding the features, it’s quite easy.
The head: It’s just a lathed curve with lots of cut polygons, extrusions, and vector adjustments, with a NURMS on top. I’m not skilled, and it took me about two hours.
Wow. I would have to say thats awesome. You’re not skilled? Don’t joke around. The only thing I could think of is that the blade looks too smooth in parts. This is extraordinarily impressive and I hope others follow in your example. You’ve inspired me to go work on mine some, too.
The material is a modified Dark Gold metal from the material library in 3ds. If you don’t have that, you can make it by using an Anisotrophic shader. Use a yellow-brown for the diffuse color, and a lighter yellow brown for the specular color. Set the specular level to a large value (depends on what you want), glossiness around 20, and anisotrophy around 50. Then apply a reflection map to the material as an environment (spherical, preferably)… use any picture with a little contrast… and it’ll look like random reflections. If you use dark greys for the colors, you get chrome.
I need to make the thing attaching the blade to the shaft next…
I’m too sleepy to explain for non-3ds people… I’ll do it tomorrow.
I’ve attached complete meshes for the head and blade as .max and .3ds. In the .max, I managed to get a file not collapsed even once, so it goes right down to the spline I stared with. The .3ds has the Meshsmooth NURMS removed.
Right… to make the blade attach-er, I spline/patched again. This time, I drew a red “Donut” shape on the gird, and used 3d-snap, snapping to edges, to draw the different splines. http://suneetpics.netfirms.com/BladeAttach.jpg
The only thing you want to keep in mind is that you have to draw the different splines with the same number of verticies, and in the same “pattern”, so the vertex numbers line up from layer to layer, as in the picture. I did it in three sections, and attached the sections by cutting away polygons and welding verticies by hand. You should be familiar with the CrossSection modifier, if you want to switch to MAX…
