Render 1

For render one I wanted to create a sword in the stone look from the Arthurian legend of Excalibur. I followed a tutorial for how create a rock for the sword to be embed in. I then tried to create a simple hill for the the rock to sit on but no matter how hard I tried the renders always came out with the hill looking very low poly. I therefore decided that another rock would work as a hill or mountain so I made another rock for the first rock to stand on. For the sky I experimented with downloading a sky texture externally but in the end settled for the internal setting found under the sky texture node in the world shading menu. I went with sky type of Nishita as liked the light it shone on the sword. I adjusted settings for it, specifically the sun elevation and the air to create a striking sunset that I liked. Finally I experermanted with many camera angles, some higher but this exposed the lack of a mountain or hill below the second rock. The next angle I looked at was a close up looking up but this did not show off the sword like I wanted. In the end I settled on the camera looking slightly down from a distance.

Render 2

For render two I looked for inspiration on google and found a sword resting on a mirror in a black void and I immediately wanted to replicate this for the second render. I set out to achieve this by adding a plane for the sword to sit on and set it colour to black and its roughness to zero to create a reflective surface. For the void that the would surround the sword I set the world colour to be black to create the void like space I was after. I wanted to do more so I wasn’t just replicating something I saw online so I set out to make it different. I experimented with making the sword glow like it was freshly forged but I did not like this result as it removed a lot of the reflectiveness that the sword had before. In the end I decided to place a flame at the end of the sword. To achieve this I added a video of a small flame onto a plane and set it behind the tip of the sword. I knew what angle I wanted this time as I needed a low angle to best use the reflective plane, I did this by angling the camera from a low angle to get the effect I was after.

Out of the two I prefer render two as I really like the effect the mirror give and I wasn’t happy with rock that was meant to be aa mountain in render one.