Dragonslayer Greataxe Model

Challenge 2 from 3D Game Art 1, 2025 (Concept from Dark Souls 3). For this challenge our prompt was to just make a weapon. Since I wanted to take a more interesting route, I decided on the Dragonslayer Greataxe from Dark Souls 3 as it is my favorite weapon from the game and I think it has a really cool design. I think the model turned out really good despite how low-poly it is and think I also did a good job with the organic texturing of the axe head.

To make it, I imported references from the internet to try and get a nice front and left facing reference plane in 3DS Max. From there, I started with a cylinder and extruded it out to a proper length. Next I added extra loops at the top and bottom so I could collapse the bottom and top most loops into a single point to create the "pointed" ends. After that, I went through and added extra loops to accentuate the naturally-shaped handle geometry. Finally, I created a cube and edited it into the proper shape before attaching it and its open verts to the handle object.

Overall I felt this project was a good challenge and was a really good opportunity for me to try modelling different subjects under a time constraint. It got me a lot more used to the editor, using swift loops, and attaching different objects to one another with target welds as to not leave open geometry on my model.