These viking style assets are part of my personal skill exercises. Every once in a while I try new approaches, new software or just brush up on my current knowledge and try to make something great.
By first gathering reference photographs and drawings I plotted out a base shape of the hatchet in Blender, which was then further optimised and added with details such as the leather strap.
The next step was designing and drawing the engravings on the blade with Photoshop, which in turn could be transferred to a normal map using Quixel NDO. From here I could start building the PBR materials with Quixel DDO, such as the metal with painted engravings for the blade and the weathered wood for the handle.
The design of the Battleaxe is based on the hatchet. I started out by reusing the geometry of the blade and expand on that idea to make a doublesided version with a longer point. Several other parts could be reused to maintain a similar style, such as the leather straps around the handle and at the bottom.
By following a non-destructive workflow on the hatchet engravings, I could easily reuse some of the runes and decorations by altering the masks and positions. Additional engravings were made by hand to match the overall style.
The shield is made up out of separate parts to allow certain parts of geometry to be simplified without getting jagged edges.
It was designed to match the style of the hatchet and battleaxe, by using the same type of metal and wood, the look and feel remain similar.
The final set was placed in a HDRI environment on a photoscanned treestump asset from Quixel Megascans. The following breakdown shows a step by step view of each individual PBR layer.
