Beowulf Hero, and King. Part 3
I mentioned hard surface modelling in part 2 of these posts. Knowing what you want to do and creating the object you want are two separate things bridged only through knowledge and experience. Creating the swords and gold hilt took me a substantial amount of time to create. Add to the mix the increasing amounts of research I did as I progressed, this period of the project took me far too long. Furthermore, I want to stress I am no academic and used my research to inform my artistic sensibility only.
I dived into the modelling of the swords with only a little bit of research on the actual time periods of the saga, the early migration period. Eager beaver comes to mind. I did a little “google” research and there were a few Celtic sword designs that met my criteria of being a warriors sword of the period, the first sword I wanted to model. It was only after I started modelling the first sword I discovered the images I’d used were incorrectly attributed to the wrong period. The problem I then had was, how accurate should I be? There are many translations of the original manuscript and numerous interpretations. How I interpreted all the information I read can be summed up as follows;
Three swords, Hrunting, Naegling, and the giant made sword:
Hrunting is the first sword, given to Beowulf by Unferth, a thegn (a retainer, servant) of the Danish lord Hrothgar. It failed Beowulf when fighting against Grendel’s mother.
"Hrunting, the blade Hrothgar's spokesman Unferth lent him in this hour of need, a preeminent ancient treasure, its iron edges etched with poison-twigs and baptized in blood; in battle it had never failed anyone who flourished it boldly and dared to indulge in desperate war-play."
As mentioned above, I’d settled on the design of this sword before I’d fully researched the blades of the period and mistakenly referenced a Celtic battle sword made by a modern armory. I later discovered after lots of research for the second sword it was an arming sword used in medieval times 2-3 hundred years after the period this saga was set. But, I liked the design, and who is to say it wasn’t the design used by some ancient blacksmith ahead of his time?
Naegling was the second sword I modeled, the Kings sword. Even though Hrunting was described as having gems I wanted to create a visual contrast between both blades. Naegling was described as being old, dull, and poisoned, but I believed it would be more fitting to portray the contrast between blades by having Hrunting, a warriors blade, unadorned and Naegling, a kings sword more ornate including a folded blade. More ornate than Hrunting it was given to Beowulf by Hygelac, king of the Geats for killing Grendel’s mother. Furthermore, it is Naegling that is used to fight the dragon.
The Giant’s Sword hilt was quite a project in and of itself. Hrothgar spoke about the giant’s hilt;
“It portrayed scenes from that ancient war when the angry flood swept from heaven to slaughter the giants; those rebels suffered, that race estranged from God almighty; He gave them their quittance, the fate they deserved, in those foaming waves.”
One of the first things I had to do was figure out how to depict the great flood scene with drowning giants. In addition to this, I needed to try and depict them in an authentic manner of the period too, so lots of studying Celtic knots and artwork from around the migration period (maybe later too).
The Dragons head I had as a concept in my head. Glowing eyes and an abstract shape behind the skull and swords. The beauty of working with digital assets is that once created you have the ability to play around with your concept and composition.
The Process
I started with the easiest of my sword designs but the learning curve was huge. Using the Zmodeler in Zbrush gives control over the point, edge, and polygon which means I started with a single cube and expanded, extruded, and stretched it until I had the shape I wanted. Sounds easy right?
The second blade was a blade fit for kings. This meant I had to do all of the above and include some masking and projection to build up the simple Celtic designs on the gold hilt.
There are several stages in this project where it was great to see my concept coming together. Adding the swords to the skull and crown was definitely one of them. It’s worth noting that I positioned the blades pointing down. This symbolises peace. Pointing the swords up is a symbol of war, en garde!
I started the giant hilt by creating simple Celtic patterns and expanding on them. In the above example you can see the different texture used to bring out the raised detail. At different stages I took these designs into Keyshot to see how they would look with the gold material added.
I scoured the web looking for different ways to draw out the Celtic designs. Not as easy as they look. After sketching out the basic design I kept refining it over and over again until I was happy with the layout. Then it was a matter of cleaning up the line work and creating a black-and-white version to use in Zbrush. One of the things I was surprised with at this stage was the “jaggies” created when projecting the design onto a surface in Zbrush. If I needed a more refined edge I’d have been screwed. But due to the hilt being small in my overall design it wasn’t a problem. Something to keep in mind when working on my next project is the document size in Zbrush.
While creating the giant hilt sword there were periods when I just wanted to give up. But, I kept pushing ahead. This is the central piece of my composition and I wanted to illustrate the overarching theme of paganism versus Christianity. The technical challenges took a while to sort out. Trying several methods to project or extrude the design onto a cube didn’t always give me the desired effect. But again, persistence paid off. The hilt shows the story of the demise of the giants and includes the tau cross. I can’t remember where I read about the symbolism of mystical objects and the similarity between Thor’s hammer Mjiner and the Giant sword hilt in Beowulf. As such I decided to create the hilt as a hammer shape too. I could easily envisage a giant swinging the sword about like a hammer too (come to think of it, maybe not with a gold hilt though).
Giving the objects some texture and material in key shot is one of those stages I really enjoyed. Spending some time composing the objects and tweaking the camera depth of field etc really brought them to life for me.
Creating the dragon’s head was a lot simpler than the swords, I much prefer organic sculpting to hard surface sculpting. Again just starting with a sphere I used the clay build-up tool and the move mesh tool to gradually build up the shape I wanted. Once I had the basic shape I started to add more and more detail. Once I had the head designed I couldn’t wait to take it into keyshot and add the mood lighting.