Weapon Crafting Question

Hey all... I'm starting to get int swords and whatnot as far as trying to craft my own to play around with. I've only played around a little bit but I'm running into trouble doing katana type swords. The curve is throwing me off. Also, do most people actually make the blade sharpen towards the edge, or is that done mostly in texturing? thanks for any help.


Jak

Are you making a "Hiro" avatar?

It's rather easy Kaimi, all you need to do is use a Tube or Torus shape. Sorry I'm not at home right now so I can't take screenshots, but I'll try to explain it.

Using only adv. cut you can cut it out so only the section in middle of the tube/torus is left and comes out to an edge, so basically you have a ring with sharp edges(similar to the Predator's disc, if that helps). Then you just use normal cut to take a section of that and stretch it to look like a katana blade. It's a lil tricky getting it to look right but it's not too hard.

Archanox is definitely the master at making swords but I've found another solution that seems to produce an even better looking blade, in my opinion. Unfortunately it is a real pain to set up.

Rather than using a torus I used a cube as the base. Just like the torus you have to set a starting and ending cut that gives you a 'home plate' shaped cross section.

Since this 'base block' doesn't have any curve you will need to make several of them to produce your curve. In my case I used 8 of them, if memory serves. Because the in game editor doesn't give you enough precision to precisely align the pieces together I ended up using the offline Blender editor to lay out each piece. It takes a lot of tedious math to make sure all your edge vertexes line up, but it can be done.

Unfortunately the export process out of Blender made some small shifts to the values, I assume because of rounding errors. I went through the text file afterwards and cleaned up those values, though to be honest I'm not sure if that is really a necessary step.

The kissaki is made from a 1/4 torus with the the center hole reduced to nothing and the exact same cut to give it a 'home plate' cross section.

There are three primary advantages that I can see to this type of build. The first is that it generates a completely distortion free map along the blade. The torus method distorts the map towards the tip. You can try to compensate by counter distorting the texture if you want to use the torus method. The second advantage is that with your multiple sections you have a lot more control over the curve of the blade and are capable of tapering the blade towards the tip. The last advantage is that the torus method really only produces about 2 'bends' along the length of the blade.

There are of course several disadvantages to this setup. The first is that it takes a lot of time and headache to setup. The second disadvantage is that there are very small areas of overlap where each section meets. Usually this doesn't cause too much of a problem but it is a potential area for rendering artifacts. The third problem is that since the sections are separate you can occasional get a little 'faceting' in the renderer, especially if the material is set to be shiny. This mostly tends to appear when the sword is unattached and is at precise 90 degree angles to the world. Fourthly because the tolerances are so close if you keep linking and re-linking the sword blade rounding errors can push the sections apart, resulting in little gaps. This can be avoided by linking a single time, however. Finally the yokote is at a 90 degree angle to the edge of the blade, which is not highly accurate but something most people will probably overlook.

So anyway, there a suggestion for another way to build your sword blade. It's a lot of work and it has its own drawbacks but I think it produces some pretty nice results.