emptyskies

The brief on these assignments was efficient low-poly modeling, against a budget of a thousand triangles. Empty Skies — Tri-Edge’s dagger from the .hack series — is an awkward shape to spend that budget on, because nearly everything that makes it recognisable lives in the silhouette: splayed blades, a hooked guard, and gaps you look straight through. Outline is exactly where triangles have to go, so there aren’t many left over.

The finished mesh came in at 723. The wireframe is the part worth looking at — density concentrated where the silhouette actually changes direction, long flat spans anywhere the shape reads as straight, and no interior detail at all.

It stops at the mesh, deliberately. There’s no texture and no material work, and it isn’t meant to survive a close-up; the assignment was the budget, not a finished asset. Anything that isn’t in the outline was supposed to be carried later by a texture that this exercise never got to.

The reference image shown beside the model is the series’ own art, used as the modeling target. It isn’t mine.

This is one of my earliest class pieces at Stanly Community College. I uploaded it to Sketchfab years after making it, so the publish date there is much later than the work itself.