About the inspiration
I wanted to model a sword for The Witcher 3, because I heard about the new RedKit modmaker kit, and I wanted to try it, so I searched reference (the sword below, https://www.militarysurplus.hu/product-hun-43263-Ferrum-kard-Magnum.html).
Steelsword of Becse
For now this sword is usable after level 99 just to kill everything with one swing. I want to make a proper quest for it and adjust the skill level needed to use it and the damage output later.
How I created it?
I made the whole project from start to end. I used Blender for modelling, UV-ing, lighting, rendering and Substance Painter for texturing, then I put the model into The Witcher 3 as a mod with REDkit.
Texture maps and special viewmodes
UVs
The sword was too long and I did not want to waste UV space and long triangles can cause visual artifacts in many cases, so I chopped the sword into smaller sections then made a triplanar projection in Substance Painter later in the texturing phase to hide the seams.
Preparation for texturing
I defined the vertex color masks for easier material setup in Substance Painter
I baked the high-poly model normals into the lowpoly model normal map
Texturing
I set the materials based on the color mask map baked from vertex color I checked that the albedo and the metalness are staying inside the realistic range as they should not be full 255 or full 0, they should be inside a defined range
Texture Map Baking
I made a research with Vesemir’s steelsword and as it seems, the REDkit tool uses a Diffuse map with an alpha channel which is completely white (maybe specular) on Vesemir’s steelsword and a Normal map with an alpha channel which is the Glossiness map. Each map is in 1024×1024 pixel resolution.
In the RedKit
I put the sword with its textures into REDkit, the official The Witcher 3 modding tool (the left one is Vesemir’s steel sword)
I am planning to make a little quest to obtain the sword in the future, but now it is foudable in Kaer Morhen under the big tree next to the ballista.
The current version is downloadable in this Nexus Mods page:
https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/11086