The Langeid Sword

This is a piece I created in a single sitting.
It's been a while since I sat down and created my own piece outside of work, so I challenged myself to create an asset that would happily sit in something like Unity or Unreal Engine within 4 - 6 hours.
The first stage of this was reference images of the real thing and replicas.
This asset was more of a challenge to create, I haven't used Zbrush in quite a while so I decided to do all the gold carvings on the high poly in Zbrush.
To do this I first created an outline in Photoshop from photos of the original sword. I traced the carvings and used these as an overlay in Zbrush so I can mimic the pattern. Once this was done I created other parts of the high poly in 3ds max and assembled before doing the low poly and baking in Substance.
The original which is on show at the University of Oslo. The Langeid Sword was found in an archaelogical dig in 2011 in the Setesdalen Valley.
It is unknown how old the sword is but the grave itself is roughly from the 11th Century.
There have been other swords found that are similar, but The Langeid appears to be a one of a kind. Ones that have been found to be of similar style were found in Denmark, Suontaka in Finland and several in the Baltic Region.