Crystalforged War Axe

Description
Jose brings to you, on this fine day, an update (of sorts) on Zug's Crystalforged axe. Well, I would gladly get underway with the review, but first I feel an obligation to recall what Inyri said about the previous version.

[quote]I would have let Kouen review this, as he's the staff WoW buff, but he thought I might have something more constructive to say other than "hey look, it's an axe" so he let me have a go at it. The author included his reference pictures, so knowing WoW probably isn't all that necessary, eh?

So we've got us an axe. A blue axe... with a rather strange design, but then again that's WoW for you. I like the model, personally -- it's low on the poly side and doesn't use any more detail that it needs to. Of course the blade vertices aren't welded together so it doesn't look very sharp, but maybe that was on purpose. My other beef was that the edges have not been properly UV-mapped, leaving stretches wherever there is a surface perpendicular to the blade surface. It's a newbie mistake which can take a while to completely get over; I still accidentally do it from time to time myself.

In-game the weapon looks quite good. The stretching isn't as noticeable, even in the saber selection menu, and it has a nice environment shader on it. A little stronger than what I would've used, but it works. The author said he wasn't sure why the weapon didn't glow, and that would be because he didn't tell it to in the shader (he has the texture made, but doesn't call it anywhere in the shader). That could be easily rectified, leaving a couple of tasks he could complete for a V2.

Also I'm not sure if the author did this on purpose, to reflect WoW in any way... but geez is that axe big! Sizing was one of my biggest challenges when modeling, and continues to be a bit of a hassle to this day. Unless the ginormous size is intentional, it could be address for a V2 as well, if the author wanted to continue on with this project. Personally I think it'd be well worth it, because while it's a good product now, there's still plenty that could be improved.

Oh, and by the way... do I get my beer now?

~Inyri[/quote]

And here come the updates. First off, the glow works. Secondly... Well, there is no 'secondly'. There's just the glow. That's it. There's nothing else new. Makes me a sad Jose. But what can we do, eh? Give it a whirl if you didn't fix the glow yourself.

- Jose

Also, I'd like to hand out some advice to my fellow warriors out there. Should you ever face an opponent wielding this weapon, be veewy, veewy caweful. It's got two blades. Short, admittedly, but still double damage if you're unfortunate enough to get a full hit.