I hope everyone had a great week since we posted some in-game screenshots of Pyrrhic Victory! The other day Andrey (our awesome 3d Modeler) presented me with some in progress screenshots of one of the weapons used by the nation of Slahor: the Shishpar. The Shishpar is a flanged mace with a sharp point on the top. With this deadly weapon you bash someone like a normal mace, but the sharp flanges rip through thin armour and skin with ease – and if that doesn’t work, you can always stab them with the tip.

While the Slahor army marches in formation, they don’t fight in formation – the versatile Shishpar works perfectly with the spears, claymores and falchions that other soldiers in the army use. The shorter weapon allows the Shishpar soldier to close the distance once the longer reach weapons have shattered the enemy defense. The flanged mace allows the soldiers to rip through most enemy armour and even crack wooden shields. Take a look below to see why the Shishpar is such a great tool for the job, and how we made it!

The first stage of creating the Shishpar was to create a high poly version of the Shishpar. This already looks amazing to me, and is a good starting point. It gives us a feel for how the weapon will turn out before Andrey spends too much time working on it. Getting to this point took about half of the total creation time, but modifications further down the line take a lot longer than making them now.

In this case, I thought it looked spot on, so he continued on – he perfectly captured what we needed.

Next is making the Shishpar low poly. Basically we want to turn the Shishpar into a low poly model so that it is smaller but still looks essentially the same as the high poly model. Smaller 3d models take less resources and load faster. In other words, we can have a bigger army of Slahor Shishpar warriors running around because our Shishpar isn’t taking up too much of the computer’s resources. While the resource save might not be much for an object as small as a Shishpar, every little bit helps when you reduce the polys for weapons, characters, armour, siege weapons etc.

After the low poly version is creating the UV map for the Shishpar. This basically maps the Shishpar to a 2D map(U axis and V axis, like on a graph) that allows us to texture it and have the game engine know how to apply the texture. Once it is UV mapped we can swap out textures to create different looks – do we want a rusty Shishpar? How about a gold gilted Shishpar, or a pitch black one? Once the UV mapping is complete we can change the texture map much more easily.

One more screenshot before we’re done!

I think it looks as great as the high poly version – while using quite a bit fewer resources! By now, Andrey has transferred all of the information from the high poly to the low poly, including baking in the different maps such as the normal map, used for by the engine to reflect light correctly.

That’s it for now – I hope you all enjoyed a look at the creation process for 3d weapons. We’ll have more weapons to post soon.

You can take a look at the finished Shishpar here with all the great detail Andrey put into it: https://www.artstation.com/embed/1877489

If you have any questions about the creation process, let us know and I’ll be sure to pass them onto Andrey if I don’t know the answer myself. Of course, also let us know what you think of the Shishpar. If you like what we’re making, please be sure to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for more posts, and share/retweet what you can to help spread the word.

See you all next week for more stuff in the works!

-Kyle