Ava-Mantora

Description
The author of this model claimed it was fun to make. I wouldn\'t doubt it, personally. The sword is a very unique design, and my only complaint with the design itself is that the blade tends to look a bit chunky and blunt. Part of this may be due to the texture not enhancing the model. The texturing here by far is the weakest link. It does very little to enhance the model, and from a distance it almost looks like the model is completely untextured, much like the render included in the screenshots. With a good texture this model would have been about ten times better - I sincerely hope the author will keep that in mind for his next model, and I do hope there is a next one!

Let\'s get into some more technical things. The model itself is pretty good. It probably uses more polies than it needs to for the same effect, but not in an outrageous manner. At first I was going to complain about the gripping in-game being far too low - after all, you can see how long the handle is! I am fairly please I rotated my camera around to get a better look, as the gripping is, in fact, perfect. Perfect, as in it couldn\'t possibly get any better than that. The model actually grips the sword right about the circular portion, and right smack dab in the middle of it with the other hand. You can\'t see this in the screenshots, but trust me when I say the positioning is very very good. Most people wouldn\'t bother, and if the author just happened to accidentally position it this way then I envy his luck.

One bug that caught my eye was the saber blade. Of course with swords the blade is turned off, but if you have a sword trail on you can still see just about how long it is whenever you swing. Therefor if you make your blade longer than the actual sword, you\'ll be able to tell. I get around that by turning the trail off (I hate the sword trail anyway) which is probably the lazy way of going about it, but in any case the blade here is about6 inches or so longer than the sword itself. Not a huge deal, unless you consider that the stats have also been increased for this hilt. The extra length, plus the boosted stats, makes this sword somewhat unbalanced. Some people, however, won\'t care about that.

Definitely a good model which just needs more attention in some places. Give your next model a texture that is just as good as the model and you\'ll have a definite winner!

~Inyri