Captivated by Kill la Kill's boisterous visuals, story and characters, I set out a goal to do a fanart of the series. I know I wanted to do something related to Ryūko, so I chose to make a 3D model of her sword. 

I modelled the sword in Maya. I approached the sword with the same technique I did when making a knife, which started out by using a plane, putting edge loops, and conforming the vertices to follow the sword's shape. I separated the sword into 2 parts, the blade and the handle. I modelled the blade first and had some difficulties getting the right thickness for the edges and the thicker part of the blade. Another problem also arose from the 2 holes that are in the blade. I did not notice that until the end, so I did the holes last.

I textured the sword in Substance Painter. The first layer is the scarlet base color, then followed by layers of purple shades and highlights. The purple shades are made from the directional light generator in Substance Painter. I angled them in a way to get the darker edges of the sword. The highlights formed when I used a mask generator for the blade. Finally, the icing on the cake is the baked lighting stylized filter.  

I exported the model to Unity and applied Unity's toon shader, which looks pretty cool and anime-esque.