Finished Scimitar Maya creation

My first (one that I'm truly proud of) Maya 3D creation, fully rendered. Being a complete novice to Maya - studying two hours a week in college since September 2012, I am very happy with the way this came out! It's only one small segment of a very, very large course, but still took about 3 hours to complete.

This was the first draft of the Scimitar. At first, I was happy with this - not to an course - admitable standard but for a first attempt. There were many problems, one being the way I made the hook on the blade. instead of inserting loops around the shape, and pulling out the vertices I extruded the shape and altered it that way - which lead to a shed load of problems, one being a bumpy shape and a really jagged look. The colour was basic Lambert colours, just go give myself a rough idea of what I wanted to acheive. 

From this, I (begrudgingly) started again. I corrected all the flaws I saw from the first to create this - a much smoother, and overall better looking sword.

Texturing is a nightmare. As the same way I applied basic Lamberts and Blinns, the same was to be done for texturing. After hunting on the internet, I found a few metal, cloth and other textures I found suitable. Then I had to apply, sort and sew the edges in a UVW map. (see below)














This field of misery is the UVW texture map. Each blue segment corresponds to a face on the sword to the left, which all needs to be sewn and sorted to make the texture flow around the faces, rather than just tile each one. This isn't particularly difficult relatively, rather is extremely time consuming.










The actual sword took half an hour, the other two and a bit hours was just texturing the shape.



And here is the finished sword, showing all angles. I gave the counter-weight at the end a ruby texture, the hand guard a brass, leaving the handle itself a rough cloth look.