I’ve been working on this for a few weeks, and I’ve been on and off Blender during the past year, so I’m a little rough. I’m pretty proud of this, but I’m sure there is a lot that can be done to improve it. I don’t think it is particularly eye-catching or interesting, so if y’all have any suggestions for making it better in that sense, I would appreciate it.
there are various things you could do to it to give it more interest. personally I would make the guard thicker and maybe add some ornamentation. there are ways to do this rather quickly if you know how. I would suggest: start with skin modifier on a string of vertexes, apply modifier, add subsurf modifier, add some edge loops to tighten up certain areas, apply modifier, use sculpt tools to sculpt in details, retopo, and bake the normals of the high poly mesh onto the low poly ( and UV mapped ) one. That is a lot to digest, but if you take it one thing at a time, it’s not so hard. start by looking into the skin modifier and play around with that until you have the form you want, and then move on to the next step.
The lighting seems a little harsh. My eyes keep getting drawn to the shadow of the hilt. Additional light sources and softer shadows might help that.
As far as interesting goes… When I think about the swords I’ve seen on display at museums, the details that always strike me are those in the overall materials and the blade itself (which is naturally the most dramatic end of the object). Was it in pristine shape, or was it used/worn/damaged? Was it functional or ornamental? What story did it tell?
I think that if you were to change the camera angle, you could get a significantly more interesting composition. In my mind, I would bring the camera down and closer to the hilt, and have it look down the length of the blade at an angle (e.g. a close up of the hilt in the lower left corner with the blade pointing away towards the upper right corner. Then you could even pick a focus point and add some Depth of Field of the composition. I recommend you lookup sword photos on Google to find a composition that peaks your interest and apply similar effects to your scene.
As Rajakabapockets suggest, having something to hint at a story can also draw a significant amount of interest to an image.
Not very technical advice, but mostly drawn from some photography background.[URL="/u/Rajakabapockets