Project 2: Curved Dagger

On my second project I chose to model an asymmetrical dagger, which had small spined wings and a bat face on the handle. I took some time just staring at my reference, deciding on how I should approach crafting it. My first thought was that the overall shape resembled a long flat rectangle. So I began with a long flat rectangle and began to partition it into manipulable faces. I did this by using the edge loop tool and interactive split tool, first forming the faces for only the handle. I switched over the smooth mode, in order to see where exactly to stop the handle, because I wanted the over end to maintain a certain sharp point.

Now that I had my “clay” set up for molding, I chose to concentrate forming just the handle. I molded out the top notch of the dagger by selecting the faces at the top of the handle and extruding them. I then moved the notch down somewhat in order for it to cup the top of the handle. After that I selected the part for the hand grip where there were small etchings of rope onto the dagger. I noticed that there was a swoop in the shape of it and the handle became thinner on the way down to the blade. I tried to imitate this by scaling down certain sections of the handle at a time. I later came back to the handle, and extruded out some sections to give the handle more of a textured surface; just in case I want to come back and texture in those etched ropes on my ref image. The bat wings were actually the second thing I focused on in this project. It took me a very long time and a couple of re-tries and mishaps to get them to a point that I was satisfied with.  I basically sectioned out a piece of the handle at the bottom, and then on each side I selected one square face and extruded them outward, it started to look like power ranger sword.

  Then at the end of these “spokes” I sectioned off another small face with the edge loop tool, and pulled a square face out on the bottom of both of the “spokes”. Then it began to resemble something like a ninja weapon. I then grabbed the inner faces of both of my newly form prongs and extruded them out somewhat to form the webbing of the bat wings.  This formed some problems with the joints, and malformed them though. So I ended up deleting those faces and then making a bridge between the detached wing and the dagger handle. Later I came back and added more edge loops onto the wings and selected the faces in between them and extruded them to give them some inner spines. I also took the faces opposite to those and scaled them inward to make the spines more pronounced. I also took the very tips of the wings and moved them up and in somewhat to give them more of a rounded wing.

 The blade was my next endeavor. At first, I thought it would be simpler than the handle, but I did end up hitting a few snags that I tried to work around, such as the notch in the center of the blade, and maintaining even-ness of the blade itself.  I started by sectioning off the top part of the blade with the loop tool, leaving the bottom alone because I wanted to keep that point. I then added two loops vertically, in the center of the other edge loops I had made to section the blade. The faces in-between these vertical lines I pushed inward on both sides in order to form the notch.  I later ran into problems with this when I later thinned out and curved the blade by pushing sections of it in opposite directions. I went back and cleaned up some of my lined with the delete lines and vertexes tool. Finally getting the shape I was satisfied with I cut out a circle next to a smaller circle in the center of the wings, and extruded the faces of that outward forming the bat skull. I also deleted one line from the base of the skull to make the rise smoother. Finally I went back and carefully re-sized my handle and blade to about the same size as my ref image.