Nice test man! The ao really helps a lot to read it better! Maybe you dont need alpha if you have 1200 tri, could use some extra triangles for those theeth!

edit: yeah maybe not, that's a lot of theeth actually xd

Looks great, and I totally agree with orb, use them tri's!

thanks for the support

I already started modeling another type of mace.
This time I tried to do it with a little bit more of darksiders style.

you couldn't use the alpha map anyway, since bobo said the weapons don't use alpha maps.

I like both designs although I have to agree with orb on the style.

that said I like the direction you are going with the new one!

Thanks EVIL

some sculpting update
decimated it a little bit to play around in 3ds max.

some more sculpt:

made a small low poly test today:
1300 tris, 512x map AO and normal

Wow, that bake came out really damn nice! Loving how chunky this one feels. Keep going on the rest!

Thanks glenatron
I sculpted a handle and now high poly is almost finished..

now that's a badass mace.

Looking really nice!

glad you like it
made a little low poly test again.
starting to like the results.
rendered with marmoset tool bag, it's exactly 1500 tris, again 512x map.

Looks great. A bit hard to read now. Make sure the different shapes read well with the texturing.

cheers!

Damn! This is starting to look awesome (not that it wasn't already), really looking forward to the final result

David-J @ what do you mean hard to read?
Pierate @ thanks

Today I played with textures.
Tested different variations lighting, combining different AO.
Right now diffuse has a base grey color with AO on top of it, also some other maps based on Bobo tutorial, which was great by the way, thanks a lot , I also added some other maps presenting different lighting. combined it all and got this:



and also made a small animation presenting it from all direction.

I love it, keep pushing the texture. it looks like its begging for an emmisive glow of some sort. Also how did you go about making the animated gif?, would love some insight on that. great job!

thanks, I actually have thought about emmision from the mouth and eyes from the start of this challange . that's why I made an open mouth.
For the gif, I simply made the animation with 3ds max, saved it as .png format, then placed those pictures into photoshop and made a .gif..

This is how I imagine the weapon should be textured, with emmisive map:

Dude! I am in love with this asset, so good, and all the angles read really well. My only crit, is that your texturing/colors are not reading now. GO BACK! The texture version that is goldish is so subtle and very good. IMHO lol, I would do something along these lines. I hope it helps, but I really like the idea of the emmisive map, but dont go too overboard with this. Make sure you use it to draw attention to the focus areas of your asset. Add in a lot of grunge/use to this. Make it look like there is dried blood on it, and has smashe many faces along the way. Just make it very very subtle, and implied. LOVE IT!

your paint-over looks gorgeous! You made me realise that I was going towards a wrong direction. thank you for doing this. and at the same time I feel like I'm writing in the someone elses thread . I feel a little embarased that I missed this... thanks for the help, really apreciate it!

Now get this thing into Skyrim! Haha, in my dreams, maybe.
Looks awesome. Really great.

Great work man, but can I ask why you have so many UV islands? The mace's head looks like an easy enough shape to unwrap in much less UV islands.
That seems like a pain to texture (unless you're using 3D painting like the cool kids of course).

I second Maph, that could of been done with 2-3 islands.4 at the most.

Agreed with Maph and Eight, and if you follow their crits, you will have a lot more texture res to play with and, when you half it to 512x512 it will look a lot better, and help with seams.

Perhaps you are right about the seams. I didn't have any problems yet tho..
I am painting in 3d environment so it's no problem texturing (unless I will have problems later, don't have a lot of experience).
I don't think the quality would change much since it's already 512x map, ant it looks pretty good I think..
I only did it with many islands so I could save more space on the map.
at the beginning when I was testing bakes, I did it with fewer island, they didn't fit properly so I didn't know what to do. I cut it few times ant somehow shoved it into map.. but at that time it was symmetrical by two axis x and y. I didn't really like it because all the scratches on the surface were symmetrical, wanted to change that so the count of the islands doubled...
I thought that it was ok that way, but if your telling me that it's bad then perhaps I should go back again. Damn more work..
I appreciate for your comments, that way I can learn something new. thank you