The Quarterstaff, Spear, and Polearm Project (aka, I Made A Stick)

[Uadjet]

As mentioned in game several times I'm hoping to add some weapons to the game.I'm a complete novice when it comes to graphics, so there's a bit of a learning curve involved. I'll use this thread to keep everyone up-to-date on how things are progressing. I'll be keeping this first post updated when I can with new images, so my amateurish fumblings my eventually be replaced by something nicer. 

[Uadjet]

Well, the first thing I did after downloading Blender (I told you I was a novice) was to do a few tutorials. No, I'm not going to post pictures of that iced doughnut, the snowman, the anvil, or even the blend I have saved as 'psychotic rabbit'. This is a development blog, so I'm going to try and stay on topic. As much as I am able. 

The first thing I did was to try and remake the quarterstaff that already exists in game.



That's pretty much it. A hexagonal cylinder with three extruded sections. You can see both of those things more clearly in a closeup.



I used this to practice some basic techniques, like keeping the extrusions sharply defined while smoothing everything else.



Now, I Must admit that I guessed wrong at what those extrusions were. I was thinking of the quarterstaff as held in the middle, so when I did basic textures I got it rather wrong.



I put steel on the ends and a leather wrap in the middle. Oops. 

I'll post again shortly, this time with the new quarterstaves I'm working on. Getting a little variation in there.

[Uadjet]

This is the post that will show my first hesitant steps into actually making stuff. Be gentle. 

I thought I'd create my own version of that staff, and add a few embellishments for flavor. I started with essentially the same staff, except that I only extruded the outer parts of where the wrappings would go, then started work on the wrappings themselves.



Rather like that. Stuck that on the prepared staff object and trimmed the ends so it would fit.



Did that a few times, and there we go!



Those wrappings use a lot of polys, but I'm just going to use them to set up a normal map for the actual in-game staff. After that was ready, I attached a leather material to the staff itself and added some metal caps on the ends.



Not too bad. The textures need work, but I'm kinda happy with the progress so far. I even made a spike to go onto the end caps.



Got a little bored, and made a few other items to go onto the ends too:







Well, I didn't make the monkey head, I just attached it. And I don't know why I made the mace head out of black glass, I just did.

I did a few variations. I initially had some wood between the wrappings and the metal end caps, but it may be more realistic to have the wrappings go all the way to the end. I've got screenshots of both up there. Any thoughts?

That's my update!

[Uadjet]

Oh, I've also been working on a flanged mace because.... Well, I dunno. Just felt like it, I guess. Didn't get too much work done, but I've explored some options for the flanges:





Those aren't very good, I admit. I did one, and used its base mesh for the others. Very limiting, but I had about 15 minutes so I rushed. Any thoughts on what type of flanges you all like?

[Migg]

Great work Uadjet!  I hope your designs transfer to UE with little loss of detail.

Typically flanged maces had 6 or 8 flanges I am led to believe, any less and you risk your foe being hit at a shallow angle and avoiding serious damage. More often than not they were fully metallic, sometimes with a hollow shaft, to allow for a sturdy but not too heavy weapon. A look at the "medieval weapons" page in Wikipedia will allow you to have a look at a great assortment of designs for many weapon types to act as an inspiration.

Edited to add the designs on the last image are impractical: they would be prone to bending and could easily get entangled in armor or other extrusions, making disengagement tricky.

[Uadjet]

Got a better wood material setup.



Can vary color very easily, as well as making changes to the grain.

[Damola]

Nice. Damola is certainly ready to spent some circles for fine staves!

[cdmoreland]

Waesed and Jerada are training for them!

[novacadian]

Having watched my daughter become proficient in blender over the years, your jump into the deep end of the pool is very impressive,Uadjet!

[Damola]

Damola demolished quite some training dummies already with her Quarterstaff to get ready for the new ones.

[Uadjet]

Well, I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to solve what turns out to be a fairly basic problem. When I did my procedural materials they often seemed oddly stretched. After some tests I found that they were only stretched on shapes that were much longer in one dimension than another. Here's what I mean, using a basic leather material that I made:



On a cube it looks fine.



That's a little stretched, and the object is taller than it is wide.



And that's totally stretched out. After too long I finally got the google results I needed and found this bit of info.



Apparently I just needed a couple nodes to tell the material how to apply itself. The wave texture was coming from... I don't know where, but not the object itself.  Hitting Ctrl-T added those nodes, and if there's a shortcut for it then it should have been obvious that I needed them.



Actually, for this I don't even need the mapping node. Haven't touched it, and the material looks as it does on the cube.



So got that figured out. The mapping node is actually very useful when doing wood textures for altering the angle of the grain, so I'll be using that a lot. Just didn't need it here.

[Uadjet]

I've been working on wood materials as well. The first images I posted had some really ugly wood materials, and I poked around a bit to see what I could find online. Don't want to use existing images for this, as a wooden cylinder will always show a seam on one side if made from an image, and then there's the whole rights thing. Sadly, the rights issue also applies to node setups, so while I've downloaded some materials I'm trying to learn from them instead of just copying them so that I can make my own materials.

Here's a White Oak material that seems like a good start to me:



Oh, as you can probably tell I'm trying different node setups. That's why I've got a lot of nodes that aren't connected at the bottom there. I'm hoping to grow the node setup as I learn, and get something close to realistic by the time I'm done.

Oh, and on the modelling side I found a good way to learn about building spears: Skyrim mods. Seriously, they're great. I can pull up the models in Blender and see how they've done various shapes. The models themselves tend to be highly stylized and somewhat unrealistic, but they're still a great help. The actual spears and such don't seem hard to make, really. It's the materials that will take a while! And the special maps, like Ambient Occlusion and whatnot.

[Uadjet]

As I mentioned ingame, I was working mostly on metals this week. I've been trying to learn procedural scratches, as doing them that way makes it much easier to do normal maps so that the surfaces actually appear to have depth to them where the scratches appear. Here's what I've got so far:







One of the problems I was having is that I've been making items with the real world scale I wanted, and I set the units blender uses to centimeters to match the units Unreal uses. That should be fine, but whenever I was doing a tutorial about making various materials like wood or metal I'd keep having to alter the scale of nodes as I went along to get the same effect. Not doing that anymore. Making a materials using the standard unit of meters and then going to add a single mapping node to scale it to what it should be when I apply it to an object. Much easier.

[Uadjet]

I've done a bit more work on wood materials, trying to get some procedural scratches and a few different types of wood. This is what I've got so far: White Oak, Threestem, and Walnut.







I might lighten that threestem up a bit, so that it doesn't look so much like the walnut.

[Damola]

Great work, Uadjet. I like it.

Would be nice to see more dents or scratches appear as the weapon gets damaged.