Zelda Master Sword

A friend of mine asked for help creating his very own version of the master sword from Zelda. After helping him with the blade I decided to finish my version aswell.

Creating the geometry was pretty straight forward. Initially I went with a stylized but not cell shaded look, creating some pbr materials with procedual imperfections and stuff, aswell as texture painting a mask to control where my procedual blood splatters should be visible on the blade. I didn't like how that looked though. So I went ahead and UV-unwrapped the whole thing. Using some textures I got from ambientcg.com I textured the sword again. I didn't like that either. So I scrapped those materials and created a very simple cell-shaded shader which I tweaked to look good with the hdri I was using. Only thing I added back in were some procedual scratches I used in the first material.

Finally I send the render to photoshop where I only added and blurred the background and cleaned up a shading artifact that seemed weird to me.