First Tsurugi

[Vaan]

Cloud's sword from Final Fantasy Advent Children. I started this many months ago and finally picked it up again. I noticed several problems with it and basically redid the whole thing almost. I'm making all 6 swords as close to the movie as possible. They will all be functional. The real pain will be once I get all 6 done. With my luck I just know that they all won't fit together properly, lol.

here is my wire. I know the blade is a bit messy, but it works. I tried Sathe's method of using the connect instead of chamfer. In some areas, it was a lot faster and easier to use the quick slice then delete unwanted edges. Let me know if you see anything to help improve this. Where I'm going for high detail for close renders, the poly count is really high, lol.

http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk98/vaan47/wire.jpg

Here is a clay render of what I have so far. Please overlook the crappiness of my clay render. If anyone know of a technique or tutorial to improve clay renders let me know. I'm using 3ds max 9. I also have Vray but haven't used it yet.

give me C&C please and any help of observations would be very much apreciated.

[Tuss4]

very good start man! you should totally animate them when you are done!

[Vaan]

i just might do that. thanks for the idea : )

[Allegro]

Sorry for the relatively off topic question (it's looking nice by the way, looking forward to seeing it progress... I don't think their's in the movie all connects logically anyways, so you're probably fine if yours also doesn't) but:

You say that you're using Sathe's method of using the connect instead of chamfer. Is there somewhere this has been explained? Or could you explain it? I only recently learned about chamfering (I don't use max)... I'm not sure what this other method involves.

[Vaan]

when i went over the references to make this i took over 200 screenshots of the movie and i noticed several inconsistencies. i actually believe they used several different version of the sword. so some of it im making up as i go along. i still cant figure out how the blade connects to the "square" part. right now i just have it "floating" there, lol.

as for sathe's method. instead of using a chamfer with a low value (which can create too smooth of corners or triangles) he suggested using the connect tool and then manually moving the edges where they need to go.

here is the thread where he helped me out. hope it helps

http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=58900

[Tuss4]

no don't manually move the edges, in the "connect" dialog, there is a Slide toggle, use that to move the edges and determine how sharp you want the corners.

[Vaan]

i didn't know that. ive been doing it the hard way : ( well, i learned something new


EDIT: I'm redoing the blade using the "slide" feature of connect. its resulting in a much better looking mesh when turbosmoothed. I really feel like a noob, lol.

[madm4tt]

very good start man! you should totally animate them when you are done!

Yeah!!