Making a Stylized Sword in Substance & Blender

Introduction

Hello!  My Name is Nick Duarte, I am an Environment/Prop Artist.  I also do Texturing and Surfacing.  I have professionally been doing this for about 10 years now and I have worked on projects such as Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare and Plants Vs Zombies: Battle For Neighborville.

I started by gathering as many references as I could on Fortnite props, characters, etc. This step took me about a day since I really wanted to study and understand the art style, not just copy it. One thing I noticed about the style was that they have a very specific way of doing edge wear and grunge. I think that's definitely one of the selling points of the style. It has been said many times, but I cannot stress the importance of reference-gathering and observation. It's one thing to gather references and copy what you see, but it's another thing to actually study what you are looking at and understand the makeup of an asset. From modeling and understanding why or when certain shapes are used to textures and materials and how they react to lighting.

I started by gathering as many references as I could on Fortnite props, characters, etc. This step took me about a day since I really wanted to study and understand the art style, not just copy it. One thing I noticed about the style was that they have a very specific way of doing edge wear and grunge. I think that's definitely one of the selling points of the style. It has been said many times, but I cannot stress the importance of reference-gathering and observation. It's one thing to gather references and copy what you see, but it's another thing to actually study what you are looking at and understand the makeup of an asset. From modeling and understanding why or when certain shapes are used to textures and materials and how they react to lighting.

Modeling and Retopology

Usually, when I start a project I like to throw in some simple shapes to get a scale of things and an overall guide, but for this project, I just brought in the concept as a reference image and started modeling. Since the shapes were simple enough already I didn't feel the need to do that step, but again if your asset has many little parts or complex shapes I would recommend a quick block-out. Everything seen here is just simple polygonal modeling, nothing too special. The bolts were reused from another project. Again I wanted to keep this project somewhat quick! I have been using Blender for years now.  It's such a clean user-friendly program. I will say, personally, I feel like Blender is a lot more enjoyable and was made for plugins and custom tools, though the base Blender already does have some nice features.

For this project, there was no retopology. Everything that was modeled was used in the final mesh. I basically modeled things as low as possible while maintaining the initial shape and did a mesh smooth on it before I started unwrapping and texturing. Unwrapping, despite how many artists feel about it, is quite relaxing to me and I enjoy Blender's live unwrapping feature.

Texturing

One thing I really like about the Fortnite art style is how clean it is. I noticed during my research phase, that for the majority of assets the textures are fairly clean with mild color variation and slight gradients, mostly broken up by roughness variation. For the high poly, I decided to only sculpt the wooden handle and welds on the cross-guard. I might have been able to do these parts in Painter, but any excuse to use ZBrush, I'm gonna do it!

For the textures, I started by adding my base colors to get a feel for the asset as a whole. I then added some simple gradients and color variation to the diffuse  I noticed that grime and edge wear for this specific style was quite ridged and sharp, so I proceeded to add this where I felt necessary while trying to stay true to the original concept. I really enjoy stylized art as you can focus on creativity.

Rendering

Lighting and rendering were all done in Marmoset Toolbag 3. For simple prop setups like this, I usually start with a simple 3 light setup and I like to use directional lights personally. I ended up using a couple of point lights to get some extra fill light, but nothing too special here. I tend to start most of my lighting setups by getting the backlights to work from my desired angle first, then I add my fill lights one by one until I have something I like. It's important to keep in mind, less is more on this step. If you start adding too many lights with high intensities you will wash out your asset. Less is more and small layers add up, so keep that in mind when lighting. One suggestion would be to also turn off every light and isolate just the one you are working on at the time to see the influence it has on your model. The only thing I did in the post was the bloom. I'm not a huge fan of how Marmoset Toolbag handles bloom so I just do that in post-production. It's cleaner and I have more control over the final look.

Afterword

My advice for anyone who wants to do a stylized piece, or in this case, a specific art style like Fortnite, definitely don't underestimate the importance of gathering reference and really studying the style. It also helps to have an understanding of how materials react to light. This is important knowledge to have, regardless of art style. Presentation is a huge portion of a piece of artwork. Take your time when it comes to lighting and presentation and make sure you create a thumbnail that makes people want to engage with your art.

Nick Duarte, 3D Prop Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev