3D art is a passion of mine, a passion I don’t have too much time for unfortunately. However, once in a while I decide to take a week off a work on a project to learn something new. In this specific project, I tried to copy a real picture I found on the web and make a photorealistic render, with the final goal of understanding how to replicate real lights in Blender. I am usually very critical of my work, but it was very well received by the Blender community (here‘s the post), and I think I can be happy with the result!
The image on he left is the render, the one on the right is the original reference. Rendered with Blender 2.79 and Cycles + Denoiser and Filmic color management. The whole project was modeled by hand, except the leather handle which was obtained by combining displacement and normals. The chain between the handle and the pommel was created by modeling an individual chain block and multiplying it around a spline.