lesson 8 making a sword in max

Making a sword in max

Create a sword handle by drawing out a cylinder by eye, not using any form or reference.

Squash the cylinder on ether the x or Y axes and then convert it to editable poly. From hear select the bottom face and inset it and them move it to give the bottom a more a rounded edge, then select the middle egde and go into the soft selection tab and turn on soft selection, turn up the fall off and scale until you are happy with the result.

Extrude the top of the handle and then ring select the top side edges, hold ctrl and click polygon this will change the selection from edge to polygon. Extrude the selected make sure you select by local normal instead of group, scale until looks correct.

Scroll down to the smoothing group section and clear all.  Go into a side view and then select all the grip polygons and click 1 on the smoothing group section.  Do the same to the bottom but chose smoothing group 2.  Again same for the bottom of the guard and again select the second smoothing group so the grip doesn’t blend in with the grip. Keep this process going until the hole handle has a smoothing group attached.

Go into the create tab and instead of creating geometry go into the next one along with is create shape, from here click the line tool and draw out the blade as if you were looking down it. Right click the spline and convert to editable poly, this will turn it into a polygon.

Extrude the poly until you get it the same length of a blade, delete the end polygon and then go into vertex mode, select the end 4 vertexes and scale them in as close as you can to form a point with out them over lapping.

Select 2 of the verts and right click weld, change the weld threshold until they fuse together, repeat this task until both sets are fused. One you have completed this go into edge mode and select all the ones around the side and right click connect. Select how many connects you want by make sure you don’t do too many.

go into the side view and select the vertex’s and start shaping the blade as you want it. After this go into egde mode and loop the central edge, scale out to give the blade more definition more like a diamond.

Apply smoothing groups to all of the 4 sides make sure there is a separt smoothing group for each side, place the blade on the handle and prepare to unwrap.