Vigilant Update

I've been hard at work tweaking the mesh for the Vigilance Greatsword remake. I need to stop tweaking it at some point. I'm already at a rather high number of polys according to the overlay.

Original mesh on bottom. My mesh on top.
Oh..missing edge. Fixing now...

The diffuse texture is just basic colors and shapes right now. I worked on the blade today and got it looking kind of how I want it. The key will be getting the specular right. The only specular maps I've made were ones for when I was messing around in Source creating basic textures. Making one for a model is a bit different (Desaturate diffuse!).

I have no idea how I'm going to make the textures for the rest of the sword. The blade was easy because a) I found a tutorial that came close to what I wanted and b) it isn't intricate. The rest of the sword has a lot of little details I need to take into account and I'm not entirely sure what they should look like.

Yes, I have the original texture and made a high def retexture, but that was simply copying what was already there by using the bevel, outer/inner glow, satin, and pattern overlay layer styles. Fake shading everywhere. I tried doing that again and...well...it looked terrible.

I think what is making the texture really hard is me. I want to keep this as scalable as possible and stick with vectors. But there is no point to doing that. I have it at 1024x2048 and anything larger is wasted space on what little vram I have. I need this to sink in.

Once this is finished, I think I'll release it on the Skyrim workshop. If I do that, I'm going to look into making glowing gems, adding flames, and a blood splatter mesh. I don't know why I want this sword so much, but the skills/experience I'm picking up are worth it.