My Excalibur project for the Legend of King Arthur Challenge.
Concept by Carson Lei
https://www.artstation.com/carsonml
I put the most amount of revision into this prop during the challenge due to concerns I had matching the environment and sword texel density. The original environment I had couldn't possibly have similar density to the sword within the challenge parameters. To get around this issue I reworked the basalt columns, and elimated all but one. This allowed me to use duplicates of the column throughout scene with the same UV coordinates. After revision of this Excalibur scene I was able to not only match texel density across the entire scene, but increase it 20%.
The majority of the texture work is sculptural in ZBrush. The sword ended up having just about 30 million polys in its highest level. I think this extra time spent on the model was what has made the realism successful.