3DSMAX – Sword of Darkness Tutorial (Part 5 – Quillon)

With the knowledge gained for those who never knew how to use surface tools (spline modeling) from the crossguard this should be a breeze. The quillon is the simpler section of the crossguard, with a depression as well. The first task to do is draw the outline of the shape of the depression, and make it so it can be surfaced. Then draw an outline around the shape which will be the raised part, make it so that it has a vertex that lines up with the ones on the outside of the middle splines. Here’s what I did:

The outline on that picture is not connected to the middle yet. Raise the outlined shape up away from the middle spline so it’s at a reasonable distance to make a good depression. Now connect it to the middle like we did with the last depression in the crossguard. If you don’t have a vertex that goes with the middle piece, refine either the outside or inside spline to make it match.

Next, draw the outline of the outer rim of the quillon, shown selected in red in the picture below:

Yet again, make it have verts that line up with the depression outline to make everyone’s day easier. Once done, go into the side view and adjust the height so its lower than the other splines that make it up. The depression outline should be higher than the rest of the splines for the quillon The depression should be below that, and the outline we just made should be at the bottom. What distances apart they are is up to you. Don’t fret about getting it correct right now, when we surface it we can get a better estimate and space it out right.

Now connect the outline to the depression outline like shown above. The reference makes it look a bit rounded near the wide end of the quillon, go ahead and convert needed parts to bezier corner and adjust the bezier handles to make it look right unless you like the way it looks. Apply a surface modifier and look at its beauty. You should have something like this by now:

One problem we have is that there might not be enough depth on the sides of the quillon. To fix this all you have to do is add yet another outline very close to the last one we did, and drop it down further below the last one. Remember, were only building half.

When you think you did a pretty damn good job, do the same thing we did from the last part of this tutorial. Mirror it and join it. Then resurface it. Remember, if you want to meshsmooth it (somewhat recommended) use a low path topology value of 2 or 3. A meshsmooth makes these look real nice.

Here’s the beast in the perspective view. I’m not sure if that’s the correct thickness because I couldn’t find a decent reference picture from the side of the sword. The other quillon is identical so all you need to do is copy it over to the other side.

Were done here, the part that makes this sword look to kill comes next! Carry on to the blade