I’ve been working on another sword for one of my fantasy characters. It’s not finished yet because I ran into some issues of my own making.
You’ve really got to be careful when you start out these models. Normally, when I’m drawing something I don’t plan out too much in advance. I know what it should look like in my head and I just go for it. This method didn’t work out very well this time.
I’ve been taking a similar approach to modeling in Blender, but I finally realize you just can’t do it that way. At least, you can’t if you don’t want to waste hours needlessly fixing faces and pushing vertices all over the place.
In this example, I knew the general shape of the sword I wanted to make, but after I finished the shape and had already started extruding the mesh I decided to get more detailed.
Specifically, I decided late in game that I wanted to have some circles cut out of the mesh in the blade. If you’ve done a fair amount of modeling, you know that cutting out holes in the mesh can sometimes be a huge hassle. Especially if you’ve already extruded some verts. (I used many of the principles of this Blender Newbies video tutorial to cut the holes).
If it were still flat it would have been a lot easier, but I had already made enough edits that I really didn’t want to start over at that point. So my only option was to punch out some holes.
Basically, if I would have planned from the beginning and just drew up the sword in pencil, no doubt I would have thought to add those circles in and planned the whole mesh accordingly from the beginning.
As it stands now, I had to do a ton of wrangling and pushing/pulling/deleting to get those circles in and eliminate all the resulting triangles. Depending on your level of skill, it may or may not be easy to do. For me, it’s more of an huge annoyance, a pain in the butt rather than a showstopper. Hopefully with more practice and careful planning at the concepting stages this sort of this won’t be such a big hassle.
So at this point, even though I’ve already UV-wrapped this thing, I’m not really happy with it. There’s some more work to be done here. I can’t decide if I’m going to start over or try to soldier on with what I’ve got. I’ll post the results back here when updates are available.
