For some time I’ve been wanting to revisit items and see how I could bring my knowledge to such elements (the current version is very barebones and limited).
I added lots of details in normals. I tried keeping the heightmap as consistent and bugfree as possible so the best course of action to bring more details would be normals.
Here on the left you can see the initial design tests I did within Substance Designer’s 3D viewer.
I added rounded features on the pommel and on the edges of the guard; I also designed a fuller on the blade and made the hilt somewhat cylindrical.
I still need to figure out something a bit more consistent for the guard but the iron sword looks overall much better already.
The rendering can vary quite a bit between shaders. Some shaders will perform calculations on items using normals and materials, whereas some will only use material data. Some will even forego details entirely and just consider the colormap.
I’m showing you here the shaders I know work with all the features I’m using. That doesn’t mean other shaders could work (I didn’t test them all).
As for the materials I decided to use iron on the blade and albedo-metal on the guard+pommel. That’s why shaders like Kappa might render the sword a bit differently (Kappa entirely overrides albedo color on hardcoded metals, Continuum does not).
Also shaders with limited PBR support also work pretty well, here with PTGI which only supports smoothness and binary metallic.
I’ll keep the focus on releasing a new Vanillaccurate version in the coming days/couple of weeks, but I’ll also spare a bit of time on the side afterwards to design some items -which will also probably give me more insight as to how to do Realaccurate and ToonAccurate items as well.
As always: stay tuned, stay safe!
HardTop Vanillaccurate 