Getting carried away

I've nearly finished my texture for the Vigilance Greatsword. All that's left is the base material for the body and blade. Right now, my main complaint is how I used the bevel tool to give it a glossy look instead of relying on the specular map.

Original on left. Remake using vectors on right.

The odd way it looks in game brought my attention to something rather obvious: the sword is flat. No details. Just the normal map faking geometry. So, while the character modelling tutorial series I'm following is stalled, I'm remaking the sword.

Original mesh on bottom. My recreation on top.

So far, I have the base of the sword (blue) and most of the details. I'm not using any smoothing right now and I'm trying to keep it as low poly as I can without sacrificing too much accuracy to the original detail. I'm hoping recreating the mesh, instead of modifying the original one, will help me avoid all those weird edge loops (or lack thereof).

Since I'm remaking everything, I'm going to change how the UV map is laid out. Right now, the official UV mapping breaks the grip 3/4 of the way up with the last 1/4 on the crossguard. Additionally, the blade UV is broken at the end of the details in the above image.

This makes it hard to recreate the texture as I need to account for the rotation and slight downscaling in the UV. From the positioning, I can understand why they'd do it that way; it is condensed into a smaller 256x512 frame instead of a square 512x512. But this is 2012 and I might as well push my 512MB 9800gt to the limit. So, I'm going to explore different layouts and see if I can make a better UV that keeps both the grip and the blade in their respective continuous sections.

I'm hoping I can get 3DS Max to behave and actually generate a normal map for me to use. The last time I tried to generate a normal map for a model, it gave me empty images. If it fails to do so, I'll do it by hand. Well, I'm not sure you can call the Nvidia NormalMap plugin doing it by hand, but I'll have to reprocess my vector texture and modify the plugin's output before sending it through a second time.