Mal'Gorok, The Sunderer of Souls, is a huge rune axe crafted by the finest Orcish Death Knights of the Ebonholde. I've been playing World of Warcraft for a very long time, and I wanted to make something that I could imagine in a game that I have probably invested most of my gaming hours into. I spent an exceedingly long time learning how to use glow maps to make the runes and eyes glow on the weapon, as Runes in World of Warcraft glow as well, I wanted to make sure that this feature was present.
The polycount of the weapon is 17036 Triangles, designed to be used in the World of Warcraft universe, but not economic enough to used in an MMO. I would like to be in a dedicated single player RPG variant, as a main weapon for the character. I also took inspiration from Darksiders, as that series of games really feels like playing a Death Knight to me.
This model uses a Diffuse, Specular, normal and glow maps - all of them are 4k in resolution. This is not the best choice for a game, but I made them 4k so that it makes it easy to scale them down to a reasonable texture resolution. I really enjoyed making this model, as I learned a lot while developing it - I came to the realisation that too many prominent colours can be a bad thing except for certain circumstances. I think for video game assets you can have a max of 2 primary colours on a model, with a third less prominent colour.
I created this piece using Maya for the base mesh, then added sculpt detail using ZBrush. I tried to get some "muscle" detail on the face of the weapon using ZBrush so it looks somewhat reminiscent of a Gargoyle. I creatred the textures using Photoshop - diffuse, normal, specular and glow. A little trick I have learned from making Skyrim mods has taught me to place the specular map within the normal map's alpha channels so that the normal detail shows more in relation to the specular.
The video above shows the model with textures, normals, glow map and finally mesh topology. Additional images show these traits as well in a still format.
Mal'Gorok, The Sunderer of Souls