Arts Award Sword Creation

As part of working on an Arts Award I had to show some way of improving my skills. I gained some inspiration from one of the games I have been playing which gave me the idea of what to focus on for this section of the award. The game that I've been playing, called Destiny, from the latest update the game now has a series of new weapons which gave me the inspiration and idea to create a sword to be used in a future animation. 




The sword is loosely based on the weapons shown in the picture below. 



I personally really like the glowing effects on these weapons as well as the overall shape and style of them, especially the hammer. This hammer was where most of the inspiration for my sword came from. I tested a couple of different versions of the sword, the first version shown below mainly served as a draft version to get an idea of what I was going to create.

I wasn't really happy with the overall shape of this version but it still gave me an idea of the basic structure I wanted for the sword. The second blade that I created really looked great compared to the original so I decided to stick with it, I also added a small floating gem detail to give the sword more of a magic look.

This was the second blade that I created.

Once I had the blade set up it gave me an idea as to how I wanted the swords hilt to look so I was able to create that almost instantly. Below is the final version of the sword that I settled with. 

The sword looked kind of boring with just the basic colours so I used the free image editing program called Gimp to create two textures that I could then apply to the blade and hilt of the sword to give it some colour. I decided that I only needed a basic pattern for each of them which was easily created. 

These are the two textures that I created.
The left one was applied to the blade and
the right one was applied to the hilt of the sword.

There was still a little bit of the sword without colour so I added a basic grey colour to that section which fitted perfectly with the style I was going for. Once these colours and textures were applied I was a lot happier with how the sword looked, to give it an extra little bit of a magic look I used the modelling programs smoke effect to create a small blue smoke effect that covered the blade of the sword.

For a first time creating something like this I was pleased with how it looked. I intend to use this in a future animation and will more than likely use it for some other future projects.