Learn to Make Hand-Painted Gothic Sword in Blender

Introduction 

Hi everyone! My name is Wiktoria Sonia Labudzinska. I am proud to say that I am both a 2D and 3D artist specializing in stylized art. My art journey began with traditional drawing and painting courses, followed by an architecture course. Meanwhile, I realized that I wanted to create games in the future. Eventually, I graduated from a Game Art university in England and started working professionally as a 3D Environment Artist.

I worked at a small indie game company, where I was responsible for all aspects of environment creation – from gathering references and creating concepts to finalizing scenes in the game engine. Currently, I am working hard on my portfolio to prepare myself for new professional opportunities.

Handpainted Gothic Sword

In 2024, I was able to attend a Kind of Art event in Copenhagen created by Mood Visuals. This was a truly inspiring experience when I had an amazing time with many creative people. During one of the prelections, I listened to a very useful talk made by Tomethee Mathon, a Senior Concept Artist and Art Director in the AAA Video game Industry.

Here is the link to the presentation he made. You only need to fill out the registration form to get the full PDF if you want to check it out.

In this talk, he mentioned how to create a solid portfolio for video games, focusing on concept art. However, with some critical thinking, the amazing knowledge he shared could also be applied to other game art roles.

I started by planning my portfolio. This Gothic sword is the first piece I managed to complete for it. I analyzed the games I liked, took notes on their art styles, and noticed that many of them featured strong shapes, vibrant colors, and hand-painted details. I decided to create something that meets these criteria.

I wanted to start with something simple and then gradually increase the level of difficulty. I often work with my own sketches and concepts. This time I decided to look for the concept of an artist that is way beyond my digital painting skills and try to apply this person's knowledge to my own work.

I had some goals that I wanted to meet in this project:

• Create a high-quality asset and achieve the best possible result that I can currently get. 
• Make a stylized 3D project with the usage of my 2D skills.
• Focus only on hand-painted textures, without any normal map and high poly.

When I noticed this amazing concept created by Carlos Ruiz, I quickly decided to contact him and ask for permission to use it for my portfolio piece. I have picked this concept because of the strong silhouette, vibrant colors, and interesting visual influences of the gothic architecture details behind this piece. With his acceptance, I started creating the sword.

I prefer to start working on the new project by finding the proper reference files. I often add my own comments and notes there as well. 

Here you can see how I managed this file for the Gothic sword.

(Remember that this file is only for me, and it is just an inspiration.)

I also put my goals as notes in this file as well as feedback that I later received from my friends while working on this project. This part was crucial for me. I also tried to find inspirational references for each material that I noticed in this concept.

Modeling

My next step was to understand the author of the concept art and what he could possibly have in mind while creating this piece. To make my life easier, I created a lineart on top of the concept where I defined all of the shapes and details that I could see here.

Then I started creating this object in Blender.

I am a huge fan of creating models like that from a simple polygon as a base. For the rounded object, I used just a basic cylinder with 8 or 16 polygons. Since I knew that I would not use a normal map here, I needed to focus on the modeling part strongly. The silhouette of this sword should be visually appealing and recognizable at first sight.  I really wanted to keep these edges where the lighting was strongly visible on the concept:

This was crucial to keep because adding bright colors in the texturing process will make these edges extremely pleasant to look at.

Here is the GIF that shows you my progress in making this sword in Blender:

As you can see, I started from the basic shape and then added more loops and polygons to polish all of the basic shapes. After that, I used Mirror a lot to have more space in the Unwrap Sheet. I was working using the Blender addon called UVPackmaster 3, which was very useful here.

Texturing

This is absolutely my favorite part of creating assets. I decided to use Substance 3D Painter here, which was shocking for some people. I really wanted to cover some of the things that I used to create this sword in Substance 3D Painter. I really tried to keep the same technique that I would use while working on the 2D object.

The first step was to set up all of the base colors. I started with a general look and then slowly went to the specific details of the model. The important part is that I was using mostly a hard circular brush with a lower opacity here, about 50% to 80%. I was constantly clicking the color/material picker to make new colors. Additionally, I used a little texture brush for the gradient of the blade to give it a sophisticated texture.

When my base colors were set up, I needed to start working on the lights and shadow parts. It is relatively easy. I used this low poly version of the model as a high poly mesh to generate baked textures.

Next, I picked the darker version of the base color with a generation mask on it. Looking at the reference, I noticed that the shadow color has slightly red tones as well as brightened parts with slightly blueish tones. I used Generator – Light and picked the preferable direction. It gave me a solid base for my future hand-painted details. On top of that layer, still using hard brushes, I added some color variations.

I had base colors and middle tones in this step. I only needed the darkest and brightest parts. I used the same type of layer here. Additionally for some of the parts, I used the polygon selection and colored some of the polygons by hand.

I repeated the same process for all of the parts of this asset. To make my life easier, I started adding details, mainly on the front part of the sword. I used the same methods that I would use while painting traditionally. I picked the focal point, which was obviously the handle, the blade (especially the top part with destroyed crystals), and the bottom of the handle.

As you can see below, to make this handle with the bird parts more visible and eye-catching, I added slightly darker colors on the bottom part of the model. The contrast here is also stronger.

For this step, my process was very simple and intuitive. However, the more I painted, the more information I could get from the original concept. 

The light comes from the top of the model, and it is slightly blueish, sometimes greenish. I applied this value to some visible edges as well.

On the bottom part, I did the opposite. I added more red and pink values. I repeated this edge work all around the model, especially on this handle with the bird heads.

The final step in the texturing process was to add many, many details. This was absolutely time-consuming but also very pleasant for me. This part depends directly on your way of saying if something is finished or not. I wanted to create a portfolio piece and try my skills here. That is why I added plenty of details.

I feel that sometimes beginners use way too many soft brushes, so their models look like plasticine. It is important to keep some areas blurred but, at the same time, to have some areas highly sharpened and strongly visible. This is why I tried to keep my brushstrokes visible without using any smudge tool here. I think that the imperfections in your stylized textures will make the final piece look perfect. 

As you can see, because I wanted to keep the audience's sight on the middle part of the sword, I decided to reduce the brightness of the very bottom part of the handle. However, painting this with a slightly higher contrast was very useful because some details were still visible when I added a solid color layer on top of it to reduce this brightness.

As the final touch, I uploaded my textures into Photoshop. I duplicated the base color layer and then went to Filter -> Other -> High Pass. I changed the blendmode layer into soft light and reduced the opacity a little bit. When re-exporting these textures into Marmoset Toolbag, it gave me a beautiful sharp effect.

Marmoset Toolbag Setup

Since the model already had many hand-painted details, my only job was to make them more visible in the final render. I decided to use Marmoset Toolbag 5 because it is very intuitive software, and I could achieve high-quality screenshots without too much effort. Before adding lighting, I changed the background color to navy blue and increased the visibility of the vignette. These simple tricks made my weapon even more visible as the main object.

Lighting

I started by adding a sky light. Since the weapon has vibrant colors itself, I only wanted to pick a natural color here so as not to change any of the existing colors that I added while texturing.

As I mentioned before, there were some edges that I wanted to keep slightly brighter. I used 3 spotlights to keep them visible.

At the end, I added a delicate pink/violet spot light to warm up the whole scene and add a magical vibe to my render. This lighting hits mostly the top of the sword, and then it slowly diffuses to the bottom parts of the sword. 

VFX

I made the VFX by using the method shown in Jasmin Habezai-Fekri's videos, created for ArtStation Learning. To keep my shape consistent, I did a quick overpaint at the end. 

The base color of the VFX is pink, however, I also used an emission map with a highly saturated blue color with maximum intensity. 

Post-Processing Settings

I set up the camera into the perspective mode with the field of view set to 40 and then increased the exposure to 1.35. For some screenshots, I used vignette with the maximum strength, around 2. To keep the stylized and hand-painted look, I set up Sharpen strength to 2.2. 

Final Thoughts

I really want to take this opportunity to say a few more words, especially for those who may just be starting their journey in game art, just as I was a few years ago.

I believe that a successful project consists of a combination of intrinsic motivation, proper research along with the knowledge gained from others, and an adequate amount of time spent working on the project.

Intrinsic motivation, in this case, is the ability to ask yourself the right questions. What do I like? What do I admire in the works of others? What do I want to do, and what skills do I need to achieve that? The willingness to understand oneself and one's own competencies makes it easier to relieve the burden of perfectionism, which I know is a challenge for many artists. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something or with something not turning out as expected. You can always learn and fix your mistakes.

On the other hand, one of the most important lessons I learned from this project was the significance of presentation. I spent a lot of time analyzing other portfolios and studying how they showcase their work. I highly recommend doing the same! Even the most stunning piece can lose its impact without a strong presentation.

In the beginning, when we don’t have much knowledge and experience, the help of others can be very effective, especially from people who are more experienced than us. Personally, I deeply appreciate all the mentorships I have attended. However, I equally value the involvement and support of my artistic friends.

Thank you for reading, and good luck with all of your personal projects!

Wiktoria Sonia Labudzinska, Envrionment 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine