Wado Ichimonji - The inspiration for this weapon comes from the manga & anime One Piece.

Translating a katana from 2D to 3D, as well as, from a less detailed concept to a more realistic style was an interesting challenge that definitely pushed me to gather better references.

Once the modelling phase began I started to get into a groove. I used a box modelling and SubD workflow (No sculpting in this project as I wanted to work on adding the detail in the texturing phase).

Next I took the model into Rizom UV to create my UV Layout.

Once the UVs were complete, I brought my asset into Substance Painter, baked my maps (including an ID map, created by adding vertex colours in blender and converting those vertex colours into an ID map in Substance Painter).

Finally the asset was brought back into Blender to finalize the render. I set up my Shaders (I like to add coloramps and HSV nodes to finetune my exported materials), I tweaked lighting and BOOM - Final Render Complete