God of War Sword - Tutorial

Eighteen and a half hours on one weapon: the Blade of Chaos, the chained sword Kratos carries in God of War, rebuilt from reference through 3ds Max and ZBrush. Seventeen of those hours are modelling and sculpting, which makes this the longest modelling section the studio publishes, and the right pick if the work that keeps stalling is hard surface that also needs sculpted, organic detail.

What ships

• ✓Seven video archives, Part 01 through Part 07
• ✓Over 17 hours of modelling and sculpting
• ✓90 minutes of unwrapping and texturing
• ✓A highpoly-to-lowpoly rebuild, shown in full
• ✓Overlapping UVs laid into a single tile
• ✓3ds Max, ZBrush, Rizom UV, Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag

The route through the model is proxy first, sculpt second. A blocked shape leaves 3ds Max for ZBrush, where the ornament and blade detail are cut in, comes back as a finished highpoly, and only then is a lowpoly version rebuilt from it. That is the opposite order to the one most game-asset tutorials teach, and it suits a hero prop where the sculpt is doing the design work rather than merely dressing it.

Ninety minutes covers everything after that. The UVs go into one tile using an overlap technique, which is affordable here because a chained weapon is largely symmetrical and mirrored shells cost nothing in texture space. The highpoly is baked down, textured in Substance Painter, then presented in Marmoset Toolbag with materials, lighting and a camera set for the final frames.

This is an intermediate tutorial with no hand-holding on interface basics, and neither the finished mesh nor the project files ship with it. Every video is unnarrated: there is no spoken commentary and no subtitle file, so the screen is doing all of the teaching.