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Weathered Krishna Chakram

Added On: May 1, 2021

I guess I’m getting a following for these – another commission project from Final Fantasy XIV, this time for the Dancer class. I upgraded my installation of FFXIV TextTools and was very pleasantly surprised to see they had an .FBX export option now. The quality of what it outputs is better than what I had to work with when I was trying to remake the Antiquated Murgleis, though the models themselves are still very low-poly.

I scaled these against a 6′ tall male humanoid model to get a general sense of how big they should be. They ended up being just about 14.5″ in diameter, which seems large but matches up with the artwork I’ve seen of the Dancer class in-game.

There’s a lot of surface detail that needed to be recreated. This time around, I took a shot at using 3D Studio Max’s step-building tools – I could draw new vertices for my geometry straight onto the low-poly model, connect them into the polygons I needed, then shell them into an appropriate thickness. From there, I just needed to accentuate the edges with crease settings, and the Open Subdivision modifier interpolates my own low-poly retopology into smooth high-resolution curves.

Repeat this process a bunch of times with the various design elements, and you’re basically done!

A bit of boolean clean-up in Netfabb makes the mesh solid and printable. I split off the inner radial spike piece and made it into a two-sided part so it would have flat faces that would make it easier to 3D print. I also split the main ring up using two separate strategies. For those with large enough printers, you can produce the chakram in two big halves. I was happy to see that this would fit comfortably on my CR-10 S4 if I wanted to print one out…

… but I also know that printing the model in that orientation is likely to produce an unflattering ‘wood-grain’ effect in the filament lines unless you had a machine calibrated to do thin enough layers. As an alternative, I sectioned the chakram up radially, trying to cut across areas where there was the least detail so that it wouldn’t be a nightmare to sand and finish.