••Roman Gladius Sword••

Hello guys, i made this low poly sword(264 tris) but now i need your opinion.So please tell me does it look cartoony or its realistic?Tell me what should i improve.I made the UV map as simple as possbile for easy re-texturing.

 

Toon style sword. Fine for simplistic (non realistic) ambience (like comic/toon style games).

But the question itself is: "What do you want it to be? Realistic or cartoony?" you made it with a use in mind, right?

 

Actually i wanted it to be realistic,but textures are making it look toony style gonna have to retexture it again.

 

Does it now look more realistic?

 

The blade has to be reflective in order for it to appear realistic.
Also if you can't do it by hand - use phototextures for the handle.

The way it is it looks cartoony, indeed.

[edit] ah - too late. Still looks cartoony, though.

 

Ah i cant get it to be reflective even if i put specular level to max.

 

because you need to use a reflective shader and a cubemap. You could of course fake it by using a reflecting metal texture on the blade, though.

 

Now i noticed why it didnt reflect anything i placed a skylight over it !
I bet that it now looks more realistic!

 

Looking better. I'd suggest changing the hilt to look like it's a strip of leather wrapped around it. Add a normal map showing depth there, as well as on the sword where you could add scratches and make it look like little chips of steel flecked off.

 

Not good enough
You need to see that it looks realistic. If you are not sure you need to step back a little and ask yourself:: "Okay - why does this look cartoonish? What difference is there to a real sword?"

Look at photos and models of real swords. Analyze them. What is it that makes a reflection for example?
It's not the specular shine on you model. Specular shine is just that. A small dot of reflected light (well - it's more than that, actually but essentially that's what it is in realtime). Reflection needs to have something REFLECTED in the metal part of your model.

Use a cubemap for that. It isn't so important WHAT is reflectet. It's important that therese's something reflected at all.

Then go ahead and get some scratches and dents into the metal. make the scratches reflect (and specular shin) less via the alpha map of your texture. Last but not least - give the remaining part a texture that is not hand drawn with cartoonishly saturated colors and pattern. for a first step use a photo and put it on the uv map.

And again: Analyze, analyze, analyze! What is it that makes your texture different from a real photo?

If you'll have to ask if it looks realistic - then it's probably not. I know it' not easy but don't give up.

 

See the tasty details?