A Work in Progress: Cutlass on Velvet

This guide was made for entry:
Cutlass on Velvet
In Contest:
swords

step 1 of 4

I made a quick sketch in Photoshop to get guidelines for creating curves along the blade.

I adjusted the curves and spline patched them toghether into polygons. The curves on the SBS is only an illustration to result on the right. I accidently deleted the original curves.

I then slightly Smooth Shifted the middle polygons of the blade to make an edge for the surface.

step 2 of 4

For the knuckle protection (don't know how to translate it) I Rail Extruded e 1 poly flat disc along a curve (the yellow bent line to the left.

The golden knobs was simple 1 poly discs beveled into shape.

For the grip, I made a ~100 point straight curve, moved it slightly to the left, twisted it, centerd it and finally railextruded a 1 poly flat disc along it. To reduce the polys i Boolean Subtracted a disc through it and removed the inner polygons.

step 3 of 4

Fot texturing, I used Lightwaves presets of textures (Shift+S in Surface Editor). They turned out to look much better then expected.

These are the presets:
Fabric - Velvet (background blanket)
Fabric - Leather Old (grip)
Metal - Gold_RayTrace
Metal - Silver_RayTrace