Game Ready Knife Creation!

hey everyone stellar here after my long hiatus from youtube today we're gonna make a sea axe or a sex knife uh there's currently a flash challenge in the hopscutter discord and i'll have that linked down below the rules to the uh challenge are pretty simple is to make a cx so i've chosen a norse viking looking one for my entry into the challenge and we're going to make it today so i want to make it game ready as well so why not so let's go ahead and get started so i like to usually start with the blade of the knife whenever i make knives so i'm just going to add in a plane and then rotate it on the y by 90. we'll just make it pretty small here and just kind of get it lined up with what we've got on as far as our reference goes i'm just going to take this here and scoot it up but yeah i i seen this challenge in the discord and i was looking at it for a couple of days i was like i don't want to make a knife but then i kept thinking about it even more like you know what i kind of actually want to make a knife so that's what we're doing um i i do apologize for not being on youtube for a long while i've just had a lot going on in my personal life and all that good stuff so definitely getting back into it slowly so i appreciate those of you who have stuck along and messaged me asking me if i'm okay i am in fact okay a lot of time that i spent on that course that i made my game ready uh ar15 course kind of dried me out a little bit even though i hadn't even been doing that much 3d work in the first place but moving on from that we're just adding in edge loops here to kind of get our base shape going for the blade in fact we're just going to merge these two together at center then we're just going to add some loop cuts in just to add a little bit more love and support and i'm just going to bevel that just slightly so we have a nice uh curve going on there and i'm just gonna do this one as well but if you're not part of the hops cutter discord i highly recommend it there's a lot of great people a lot of great artists there master zeon posts a lot of useful stuff and so do other people such as uh ponte and uh josh gambrell every now and then along with a couple other great fantastic artists so i highly recommend going and at least just checking it out because it is well worth the visit so i'm just gonna add some of this stuff in here and then use loop tools to flatten that line a bit even though that didn't do what i wanted it to do so we're just going to change it to view well maybe not all right so moving along we're just going to control z that off and instead i'm just going to knife cut it so go into k here i've cut it straight along i'm happy with that position the only small issue is that it decided it wanted to be a pain here but we can fix that no big deal so i'm just going to move these up just to get them to where they need to be and instead of gg sliding it i'm just going to push it straight up on the z and then we can slide this one here there are plenty of ways to make a knife especially for a video game i've done it like this before and i've had success and i quite like doing it like this there's other ways like subdivision modeling and everything it's just i've never been a fan of subdivision modeling i've never quite been able to nail it i did not mean to fat finger that kind of got to get reused to this especially if i you know for those of you who've taken an extended break from blender whenever you come back to it it's almost like you got to reteach yourself a lot of the hot keys and everything it can get a bit annoying sometimes so we've kind of got the shape down here what i'm going to do is just cue add modifier and solidify and i'm just going to press 2 to make it extend from the center i don't want it too terribly thick here we can go ahead and apply the solidify modifier then now what i'm going to do is just shift s and then origin to geometry and then put a mirror on it just so we have that line down the middle there and then i'm going to go back into mirror again just grab all of these edges here push them into the center [Music] just like so and we can apply the mirror mesh clean up merge by distance and that cleaned up the edge right there so we kind of have our shape going we can kind of clean things up a little bit more if we want but i'm pretty happy with how it looks at this point in my reference looking up adventures i've found that the cx knifes are pretty thick so we can kind of go ahead and get away with it being this thick [Music] so i'm pretty happy with how this looks i'm going to go ahead and sharpen it just to kind of clean up some edges here mark that as sharp as well it probably wouldn't hurt to move our reference image out of the way just a smidge bit now i'm going to go in and turn off my apply seam for the sharp options here just by pressing ctrl tilde and i'm just going to uncheck that and we're going to go through and just clear oop not clear sharp so we don't want to do that we're just going to unmark seams clear seams and we're left with that so this will work pretty good for me let's see what it looks like with a bevel on it if we notice the bevel kind of freaks out down there along the edge because it doesn't have enough love and support in life so what we can do look at it from the side view here and go ahead and press c with a knife just so we have a straight line we can try that bevel once more and it keeps freaking out on us so how do we fix this here issue so to fix the issue what we're going to do grab this point and this point here we're just going to join that together just to kind of give it some support across this large face here and then we're going to add the bevel modifier kind of crank it up just a little bit and we're going to change it from angle to weight if you'll notice we have a nice thick bevel going on and i'm just going to scoot these guys out of the way just a little bit because it's kind of messing with my bevel slightly so we got a nice bevel on that i'm pretty happy with how the blade turned out it was really quick and dirty next up we need to make the handle so i'm just going to grab a cylinder here we're going to go ahead and leave it at 32 verts because that's more than fine for a video game [Music] rotate it a bit get it into position it doesn't have to be perfect or anything we're just following this reference loosely here but i am going to place it right about there and we're just going to grab this face here pull it out kind of scale it up a little bit and down just to where we're kind of matching a little bit there and then we're going to take it and just kind of squish it a little bit on the x-axis just to kind of give it more of an oval shape instead of such a round shape and in fact we can grab this face here and just do it a little bit more on that end to where it kind of tapers slightly so now that it's kind of tapered we can go in and kind of extract this little bit of an area there so i'm just going to add in a loop cut scoot it up do the same thing on this side add a loop get it scooted up there instead of separating these pieces we can go ahead and keep it on the same mesh so what i'm going to do is take both of these edges here and we're just going to bevel them one segment make it slightly bigger i'm gonna take these s shift y make them a little bit bigger than what's on that and we can go back into x-ray mode here [Music] and just kind of select some of these faces and start pulling them out a little bit here and i want to make sure i've selected all of them and not just a few of them so let's go ahead and get those pull it out and in fact we can go ahead and just select those because it's going to work to our advantage and we can grab this face and just pull it out like i said we don't have to have it perfect or anything go ahead and grab these edges here i'm just going to scoot them out slightly just where we have that kind of shape going on and if we'll notice it is a little bit off-center so we can go ahead because i'm assuming the knife is a bit off-center it would be a bit weird if that were as far up as it is but we'll go ahead and uh leave it there i'm going to go ahead and control y that back in and we can do the same thing for the other side because it's a knife we're going to assume that's hand forged so it can be a little bit off but i'm just following my reference here like i said it doesn't have to be perfect and i'm not aiming for perfect if you want perfect then honestly there's other people who could probably do it way better than me but i'm just gonna keep doing what i'm doing the way i'm doing it make sure i'm grabbing the right ones here which i am just kind of want to pull those out a little bit you don't have to do this part if you don't want to if you're following along but i like to maintain it as best as i can and then from here what i'm going to do is just take this edge and this edge but before we double them i'm going to go ahead and apply the scale just add a nice little chamfer to it make it look good go ahead and sharpen it slap a bevel onto it not too meaty we do have a slight bit of a strong edge here so i can add just a loop cut into here loop cut into here [Music] that kind of gets rid of that sharp edge and then we'll do just two down the center just to kind of smooth that out or if you want to you can add a weighted normal modifier to it that should clean it up a little bit but in fact we're going to go ahead and keep that weighted normal back on because it kind of cleans up things just a little bit for us makes it a little bit neater and more easy to handle so i like it the way it is here final step what we can do is we can add that little loop in and that's going to be a pretty simple thing to do we can just add in a taurus leave it at the geometry that it is at go ahead and scoot it back a little bit and down and i'm going to just grab from here over to here back over to there too far [Music] selecting all that and then i'm going to just extrude it along the y-axis like so but if you realize we didn't go far enough down so we'll go ahead and grab that as well and then we can extrude it straight out going to go to loop tools and flatten it even though that did not work at all let's try that again loop tools flatten and we'll go to best fit instead i can just go ahead and get rid of those faces do it like so we'll rotate it on the y by 90. make it a wee bit smaller we basically just wanted that uh hard shape there so we can sharpen it bevel it if we want i kind of like the way it looks so we can go from here next up all i'm gonna do is just mirror modify pretty much everything here just to make sure we are matching and all that good stuff so now that we're done we can go ahead and name these things appropriately so i'm just going to name these their appropriate low and highs so this will be our high poly ring handle underscore hi we'll just do that okay now that we've uh labeled them appropriately we can go ahead and get rid of our reference image because we don't need it anymore we're pretty much finished i'm going to take both of these duplicate them duplicate these make sure we're good which we are and anything that has the 01 on the end of it we can just rename to low now that we have it on the low we can go ahead and a lot of people might not like what i'm about to do but you know it is what it is and we're gonna can we're just gonna do it anyways with the bevel modifier if we go into wireframe we'll notice that this is too many bevels for video games it could work technically because we only have 12 000 tries in total here which this is perfectly fine for a video game weapon it's just a little on the high poly side for my liking so what we can do is we can increase the bevel on certain things if we want to or we can decrease it and take it completely off and bake it but i want to do the segments uh like a one segment or two segment bevel on it just to maintain some of this nice bevel here so when we do bake it it'll look good whereas instead of if you get close you'll have really sharp edges no matter whether you bake it or not so i'm just going to hide all of the lows here and i know you can do it in different collections i'm just lazy and i don't want to so don't hate me so now that we have those hidden we can go ahead and take a look at what i'm talking about so if we get rid of the bevel completely and bake it and turn off the bevel you'll notice the tip moves from one point to another and it'll cause really crappy bakes and we don't want really crappy bakes so in order to stop that from happening we can go down to a two segment bevel some people call this a two segment bevel or korean bevel either which way it doesn't matter it still maintains pretty much the same profile as the three segment bevel does whereas it's just a two segment bevel so the bake will come out nicer and it's all easy and ready to go so i'm just going to do that to all of these here but we don't want to do it on the high poly instead what we can do on the high poly is just crease the bevel a little bit just for a smoother transition but we don't have to so i'm going to go back down to three i'm gonna hide all my high and bring up the lows and with the bevel turn it down to two segments and then apply it two segments and apply two segments and we can apply it now there is a really cool feature in blender if you have like a two segment bevel you can add a weighted normal modifier and it'll look like it's all nicely beveled so that's what i'm going to do on this instead of baking i have these others just in case i do want to bake it if i want to remesh it or whatever but we're just going to do it like so [Music] okay with the weighted normal it looks pretty good and we can go in and start grabbing and marking seams so i'm just going to grab this here the entire edge loop down the center go ahead and fix my camera because it was being a little weird and we can grab this one too you don't need this one here marked instead we can do these edges here as a seam it really doesn't matter as long as it lays flat and looks pretty good you can pretty much have a seam whichever way you want so go ahead and mark that as a seam straight down the center i'm just going to add a support seam here we can grab this entire edge as well make sure we're not going up into that which we are not grab that edge mark it as a seam if we notice a small little area in which we can fix just go ahead and merge it at last and then i'm going to shoot over to that there we can go ahead and mark this as the seam as well doesn't really matter as long as it unwraps well there's no super secret on how to do it correctly just mark the seams and continue along in fact i'm going to go from here all the way up to here and then back down to there and that's not at all the right one that i grabbed but instead of going there we can just go from here mark that as the same as well just so we have this little area that might mess up in the unwrap so we'll just go ahead and mirror modify that over to where we're good on both sides for this we're just going to be simple with it grab the line straight down the center [Music] mark it as a scene we're going to take the edge right here arc is the seam and this inner edge here [Music] pretty much just going to go in and manually click it all since it doesn't want to act like a loop mark that as a seam [Music] go from here down to there just go through and make sure it's all seamed up and ready to go i apologize if you hear a dog barking in the background i have the windows open because it is hot mark's same [Music] [Music] mark same and then i'm just going to go on the bottom loop here it doesn't have to be super precise wrong one we don't want the hedge crease we just do the marked seam inside and outside so we don't have any weird bending issues and then we can go ahead and do that and mirror modify it over just making sure we are good to go and on this i'm just going to go down the center go ahead and shift h this just so we can focus on it a little bit better mark seam i'm going to just take this whole edge here [Music] same thing on the other side here [Music] mark it as a seam and i'm just going to cut this in half and mark it as the seam so we have a little bit better of a layout on our uvs i'm going to do the same here and here we don't have to go this overboard with uh seams but that's just my decision if you're following along you can do it however which way you want to do it but i'm just doing it this way mark that is the same as well and then we can add a mirror modifier and we're good to go so i'm going alt alt h that and get rid of our pi's here because honestly we just don't need them so i'm just going to click them and just get rid of them so we have all of this pretty much unwrapped and ready to go i'm going to start adding the triangulate modifier to it once we've added it we can just pretty much apply it i applied the wrong one there the weighted normal keeps things looking pretty nice even though we do have a couple of uh little weird artifacts i don't know if you guys will be able to see it but we can easily cover that up in the texturing especially these lines here since this handle is going to be wood so now that we have the triangulate applied we can go ahead and apply the weighted normal on everything and i'm just going to select all of these and go into the uv editing tab here hey you unwrap it looks like a pretty decent unwrap to me i'm gonna go and use packmaster you can use any packing thing you want i like to use packmaster and i'm just gonna give it a pixel margin of eight select pack we'll just validate the uvs overlap check and we have no overlaps or any issues we're just going to take a closer look and press pack again see if it can get it in there a little bit tighter which it did manage to kind of fill up some of that space and i'm happy with it but before we do anything i'm going to chain and go ahead and give it a i'll just do knife knife because if we don't rename it if we don't rename it it will give it a name of default material inside of substance painter so the very next step what we can do is scale it down to be a proper size for a game so we can either do that by bringing in a ue4 character or a size reference or whatever i'm just going to use a ue4 character as my size reference now that i have my ue4 guy in here will realize that it is a little bit large this is going to be one large knife so we can go ahead and scale it down just to kind of get it about the right size if we want i'm going to go ahead and rotate this guy instead of rotating the knife out of pure laziness that works for me so we can go ahead and get rid of the dude there go ahead and apply the scale i'm just going to kind of eyeball it back into position here it doesn't have to be perfect at all [Music] i just kind of wanted it as close to the zero point as it possibly can so make sure the scale is applied and once it's all applied and unwrapped you can go ahead and export it so i'm going to export it as an fbx [Music] make sure you click limit to selected objects and we're just going to click mesh and then for our geometry the smoothing we're going to select it face and then find a good position for it to go i like to usually create a new folder for it so i can drag and drop it into my assets folder later so i'm going to just name it cx underscore knife go ahead and export it save it and then i'm going to go ahead and open up substance painter and we'll get started in there all right now that we are in substance painter we can go up to file new time change it to 4k and i'm going to have mine set on pbr metallic roughness alpha blend that's just what i use select the knife go ahead and open it hit ok once it's loaded in we'll realize oh it looks so good inside of substance painter how did we manage to do that it's because it's a weighted normal so now that we're here we can go ahead and scroll down to baked mesh maps in our texture set settings i'm going to uncheck thickness and id because we don't need either of those or i don't want either of those i'm going to make my output size 4k anti-aliasing four times and we're just going to bake selected textures now that we're all baked and ready to go we can go ahead and close that and take a look at our knife make sure we don't have any crazy burn marks or any issues when it comes to the bake and it looks like we are muay bueno [Music] so let's go ahead and get started on the textures uh what i'm gonna do is just break it down into three different folders we're gonna name this one ring this one handle and this one we're gonna do you guessed it blade so with this you might not have the same smart materials as me because i've bought and made a few myself so we're just going to follow along as best as you can or make pretty much do whatever i'm not the boss of you so i'm going to use the essie fade wood faded wood here just see what that looks like on the handle here [Music] [Music] i'm pretty happy with how that looks i don't quite care for the lines going in opposite directions like that so if we go into the faded wood here and take a look at which makes up the lines we can go ahead and change that if we make it tri-planar i'm pretty sure so if we tick that we realize that it is black grain that is the problem child here so i'm going to go ahead and click on this it is already in tri-planar projection which you know it is what it is um let's see if we change it to uv projection it does kind of fix things up for us so i'm going to rotate this by 90 degrees [Music] see how we look i kind of like the grain going long ways like so but in traditional knives i believe it's not the case so we can go ahead and just control z that back to that and we can kind of increase the scale a bit or decrease the scale because we don't want too crazy of a grain going something like this works for me so now that we have that here we can go ahead and place it in handle i'm going to add a black mask to the handle folder here and i'm just going to go into the mesh fill actually we'll just leave it on polygon go into orthographic view here and i'm just going to select that and if you didn't realize whenever you kind of draw a little square out like so it's pretty much going through the mesh and reacting the same way on the other side especially if your mesh is mirrored like mine is it's not mirrored you might want to use the substance painter mirror option as it might work a little bit better [Music] just like so works for me [Music] we can get out of this view and if we reference our reference image for me it's on the other screen but i can go ahead and drag this over to here we have that little mark there which i believe it's just a pen or something so we're just gonna add that in in the handle so i'm just gonna go through and find a material that works best for me just go into the materials tab here and i can never remember the name but it's uh steel rust and wear i like this material a lot for me it's a good material we can go ahead and plop that into the handle folder here add a black mask onto it and then we're going to enable our mirror make sure it's going straight down the center go over to alphas here for brushes rather i'm just going to select basic hard and i'm just going to stamp it right there should be the same on the other side and then we're going to go into our faded wood here i'm going to add a white mask and press x just so we can get rid of the wood where it is so we don't have the wood grain behind this mark here so if we go through we can double check everything it's a bit of a brighter color i believe uh we can go into kind of a yellowish color it kind of reminds me more of a bronzy color so i kind of like that uh shade there next up all i'm going to do is just ctrl c and ctrl v the actually we're not even going to do that i'm just going to copy the mask [Music] i'm going to add a fill layer underneath add a black mask paste into mask and then we can add some height to that whether we want it in or out [Music] i like it sticking out just a little bit and in fact we can just go and alt click the height and see if it works better for us above the steel or below the steel and it doesn't make a difference so it's fine by me go and name this height and pump those numbers up a little bit and i like to add a blur filter to things that have height to it because for me seems like it just makes it pop out a bit better just kind of turn it down a little bit looks like it pops more in my opinion now that we have the height there if we notice on our reference it has three little holes so we're gonna do those three little holes it doesn't have to be exact or perfect got our three little holes there looks good make sure the reference is matching and now with the handle we can go ahead and copy this mask we're going to add a new folder and call it accents go into our smart materials here and i'm just going to select bronze armor pop that right into the folder it looks good now we can go in and untick edge damages because we don't want it to be that damaged and then i'm gonna put that into the actual accents folder here we're going to add a black mask paste into mask and then we're going to invert the mask to where it is on the handles and not on the wood then we can go in and just just select things that we don't want to be that color i'm going to leave this here selected because on our reference it looks to be about the same so the next step you're like huh how do i uh how do i add the the cool little fancy thingies on the side here well we got alphas that substance painter ships with and there's also alphas that you can make any type of design will work you can also do some spacing and this that any other thing it doesn't really matter so what i'm going to do is just go through and find some alphas that look good on it and just start stamping them but we need to actually add a height map to do so add a fill layer give it a black mask then we can go through and start selecting what type of designs we want to have on the blade [Music] so i already have like a pretty decent library of shapes and patterns and everything but on our reference it's a lot more simple so we kind of want to just stick with simple so i'm gonna try to make it look somewhat decent like the reference so i'm just going to keep my brush set on basic hard for right now make it pretty small then with this i'm just going to add some spacing see what it looks like i'm just holding shift as i click so we can make the dot a little bit smaller and kind of crank down the spacing just a slight bit just to see what we're looking like and i'm pretty happy with that so i'm going to start here and just kind of follow the edge of the knife to the best of my abilities and the best thing we could do is go into orthographic view by pressing f6 [Music] i'm just going through and kind of cleaning it up a little bit there okay the next thing we can do is actually go in and find some alphas that look like they would go pretty good with this design here so i'm just going to use the circle dots and just hand place in some sort of design [Music] [Music] [Music] doesn't have to be crazy fancy make sure your mirror is on because having to replicate what you did on the other side is kind of annoying so i'm pretty much fine with how that is i'm going to go back into our thing here and just alt click height and we can bump the height up on it and then you guessed it we're going to add a filter and a blur just to kind of make it pop a little bit more not look so sharp i like how this looks so we can get out of orthographic and now it's time to work on the blade now on our reference if you'll notice it is damascus i like damascus a lot i have yet to find a good damascus smart material or even material in substance painter and i'm not really great at making my own so we're just going to skip the fact that this is damascus and we're going to make it just a regular blade so for our blade let's go through and look at our smart materials and see if we can find one that works pretty well with us and what we want to do [Music] [Music] i'm just gonna search metal try to find a decent looking one [Music] let's see what steel dark age looks like on this i am quite happy with how this looks we can kind of tweak the settings so i'm going to drag and drop that into the blade folder here add a black mask on the blade folder and select just the blade go ahead and turn our mirror off here and we can go through and tweak some of these settings so we just need to take a look at what does what i believe this is like edgeware so let's turn up the balance a bit more and what do you know it is in fact the edgewear i'm going to make it a bit brighter [Music] and then on top of this i'm just going to add a fill layer and go and just alt click color here we'll color in metal and we're just going to turn down pretty much all the way a lot we can add a black mask to this instead of a black mask what i'm going to do is go into our smart masks i'm going to pick stains and scratches drag and drop that onto that layer there and we can invert and just turn down that slightly because we want some darkness on the blade and some of those scratches to kind of make it look like a decently used blade [Music] we don't have to go too crazy with it and for this i'm just going to increase it just slightly see where that dark spot is coming from i believe it's this one here in fact we can go ahead and i'm fine with leaving it honestly it doesn't matter from a far distance so we have our cx knife here um you can go a little bit more crazy into the color and whatnot but i'm pretty happy with how it looks it looks like a decently used knife so to export this if we're happy with how it looks and we're finished with it we can go ahead and do file export textures find a good location for the textures to go i'm gonna select my cx knife folder select the folder make sure you select it to whatever texture set setting i'm going to do 4k and just export the textures now that it's finished we can go ahead and close and we're going to open this up in blender now that we're here in blender i'm going to go ahead and take this and rotate it 90 degrees on the y-axis just so it's laying flat and we can add a plane here g z going to take everything and just rotate it on the x to where it looks like it's actually sitting here on the plane just like so and if it's poking through a little bit that's fine it doesn't really matter you can kind of scoot it back up a little bit just like so we have our knife i'm going to add in a camera control zero wrong button there let's try that again control zero move this into a good position that works good for me i'm going to change the camera perspective or focal length to 84 and we'll just bring that back out just like that now we can go into the shading tab here click on something on the knife so we can get a bit closer and i'm just going to ctrl shift t because i have node wrangler enabled go to our knife location and we're going to grab everything except for the height because i don't really care for that for me i have to untick relative path we have that on there now and the only thing we need to do is invert the normal so move this slightly over shift a separate rgb separate rgb combine rgb and then invert red goes to red blue goes to blue [Music] green into color and color into green we're going to click all three of these ctrl g select the group inputs here just plop it in and it fixes our normals for us so let's go ahead and take a peek of what it looks like in cycles mode and we notice it's dark and pathetic and sad so we can go ahead and save this i'm going to press alt v going to look down plus rotate the lights kind of how like i like them or just press r to keep it at the rendered setting and then what do you know we have our knife next up i'm just going to double tap a and then q just add in some hops lights just to kind of spice some things up a little bit add some color variation and we look pretty decent i'm going to go ahead and add a color to our floor material just to make it slightly darker and from here we can go ahead and render it okay now that we have it rendered out it looks kind of plain and boring so we can go ahead and move our render over to our other screen if you don't have another screen you can uh still follow along we'll go into compositing here tick use nodes and if you don't have a second screen you can use you can always add in a viewer and just connect the image into the image slot so what i'm going to add in is a mix shader and then we're going to drag in the ao to the image we're just gonna swap those two go from mix to multiply and then we can add in a color ramp onto the ao part itself and you can kind of tweak and tighten up how much ambient occlusion you want on the knife and that works for me so if we bring out our render we have some nice ambient occlusion around the knife itself and that's pretty much it so i hope you guys liked the video i know it was quick and kind of a little bit unorthodox here and there um i just wanted to take part in the challenge a little bit let you guys know that i am still alive and um i wanted to thank all of you who have checked in on me make sure i'm good to go uh also i wanted to thank every one of you personally who bought my new game ready ar15 weapons course if you would like to purchase that me and a guy named josh johnson aka nighthawk put this course together we we feel that it is pretty good and pretty valuable for what you're paying if you don't like the course you at least get a 30 game ready ar15 so if you like the video please like it uh please subscribe if you haven't already and in the meantime i will see you guys in the next video thank you

Channel: Stellar-Tech Industries

Views: 770

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: hardops, game ready, tutorial, tut, help, creation, process, game, blender, b3d

Id: WC2KMikY8-s

Length: 55min 29sec (3329 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021