I made an attempt at a simple object and just worked on details and texturing, to take a break from the lessons. Honestly, I spent entirely too much time on details that didn’t even show in the final render, lol. That handle looks so fake still. If anyone has any input, ideas or criticism please throw it at me. After a long time of working on an object, I just get blind to glaring problems.
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The simplicity of modeling a sword is really deceiving. And you did a good job!
The major problem I see is that the blade doesn’t seem to have sharp edges. Makes it looks like a training sword 
If you want to make sharp edges, one Idea is to delete half of the geometry, use Mirror with Clipping On and grab until they merge, Mark the edge and Set the “Bevel Weight”, add a Bevel Modifier set to Weight, 3 segments and set the Width pretty low.
And lastly add a subsurf.
The other Edges leave Bevel Weight at 0 and just add some loop cuts to control the sharpness.
I’m curious how did you make the handle? Screw Modifier?
Looks pretty good, all that is needed is a better leather or cloth texture!
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Thanks for the critique and guide! It does look like a dull blade, but I think its all in the lighting. I actually did pretty much what you suggested when I was making it.
I went back and made sure the edge was marked as sharp and messed around with lighting some more (lighting and I don’t get along too often).
The handle I made with CurveSpiral. I messed around with some settings, made it solid and expanded it until it looked close to what I wanted. Added 2 loop cuts to make it puffy in the middle and voila, a handle was born. The texture is just noise texture with a lot of nodes added to make it somewhat leather. I’ll change it to something more realistic later. For now I just wanted to see how much I can pull off with minimal knowledge of textures and mess with nodes a bit.
Thanks again for the critique, I love input.
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Now that is much better!
Are you using Principled BSDF for the material? If you are, move the Metalness to 1 and put the roughness like 0.150 this will make it more like metal, but then you’ll need to add something to be reflecting on the blade to look good, other lights, other objects… or an HDR to the World.
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I adjusted the roughness a little bit, added more lights and changed the background a bit. The handle now has a leather texture on it too, but it’s still very muddy looking. I’ll have to get back to it when I understand normal/bump maps better. HDR was set all along, it’s a grey sky scene to stay true to the Scottish feel. Time to move on to something else, but this will be great to get back to as I grow my knowledge of Blender and scene setup.
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Yep, definetly come back to a sword later!
You already did a great job tough, all it’s needed is better materials 
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