Originally I started modeling out some very small things that i wanted to add to my room scene, as early on i had wanted to fill it up with some small things. I had an idea that i wanted this room to be a log style cabin, and one of the things i had wanted to build in this would fittingly be an axe. Originally i had wanted to build a wood axe, similar to one that i had used while camping, shown below.
I started building a simple small wood axe simply out of some primitive shapes, however i wasn’t that big of a fan on the design, and i ended up giving up for a while.
Later on throughout the semester, i had a friend streaming the 2016 game God of War, a highly detailed 3D world set in a Nordic setting. In the game, the main character uses an Axe called the Leviathan Axe, a large axe intricately that is very intractably made, seen from some images taken from google images below.
I Decided that in line with the log style cabin, i wanted to build an axe similar in shape to this, with a very intricate blade and a wrap around the hilt, i went back into Maya and made a very primitive low poly axe to be used in ZBrush. I originally had considered and looked into using splines in Maya and Importing splines made in illustrator into making designs for the hilt, but decided to do this in ZBrush instead.
I actually ended up redoing the head of the axe close to 5 times as i just couldn’t get something i was happy with, and tweaked a lot of things about the hilt, the way the cloth was wrapped around it and the bottom pieces.
Eventually i had something i was somewhat happy with. I took it into ZBrush and used a combination of Polypaint, Zadd and adding in texture through Alphas to refine the axe a lot more. Below i’ve included a video at 2000x speed of the process to achieve this.
Overall i had a lot of issues with this build. The build was so low poly that a lot of the designs on the axe didn’t really pan out the way i wanted or looked too low poly on the finished mesh. I also should have done each piece separately and then combined them in Maya afterwards however i didn’t. I also only learned halfway through that instead of painting on things, you can Zadd or subtract with RGB On at the same time to raise areas with a different colour, which is what i should have done with the Runes on the Axe. Overall i am happy that i learned some more things in ZBrush and got some practice in using ZBrush and taking models inbetween Maya and Zbrush. as this was a small model that was going to be in a very dimly lit area of my scene, I may not be completely happy with the way the model turned out, but i am happy with how it ended up looking in my scene.
After all this, i felt like my scene was finally complete, and i’m happy with the way it looks now. I Rendered out some stills (After bluescreening my PC due to accidentally setting the samples to 61 instead of 6, always double check render settings) and i plan to hopefully render out some camera animations going through the scene if my PC can handle it later on.