As you know, I have been working in my spare time in a Star Wars based character for my portfolio. As he is a Sith, he will need a lightsaber and today that is what I'm going to talk about. 

As always I started looking through Google images and Pinterest, looking for a good looking lightsaber for my character. I found this image and I wanted to do my lightsaber from this model.

I started modeling in Blender the high poly version of the model. I like to model hard surface elements with the subdivision modifier activated because when I finish the high poly model, I only have to turn off the modifier, delete some support loops and I have the low poly version in a few minutes. It's a really fast workflow.

  Once I have the lightsaber model and materials set up, I started doing the UVs. I wanted to have a REALLY high texel density in my model to be able to do really close-ups renders. But I only wanted one UDIM for being able to render it in a game engine in real-time. Also, while doing this model, Blender didn't support UDIM so using one UDIM was a must. So, the final set up was 1 4K UDIM.

Once I finished doing the UV phase, I moved to Substance Painter to start texturing. I did the baking in xNormal and Marmoset Toolbag to get the best of the baking. I imported everything in Painter and I set up. I decided to achieve a really realistic looking so I decided to make layers of materials for the scratches, burned parts... I wanted to start with base metal and on top, other different metal. If I wanted to do some scratches, I would be able to see the "Behind metal"  Here is what I mean:

So, following this workflow, I continued texturing. 

Okay so now that I have the model textured, I exported the maps to set up the render scene in Marmoset Toolbag.