Final Textured Knife Model

These are the final renders of the knife with textures applied to them. I've also played around with a few rendering techniques, such as the quality and lighting (all set to max for best results). The background is simply a default sky which will be changed afterwards. The texture is clear in the render shown in the image below, due to the light shining off it. The problems I encountered when rendering this was mainly the lighting; I couldn't seem to get the lighting position to my desired standard in order to get the best possible render. However, through trial and error I was able to get the best render I possibly could.

For the blade, I used the blinn material and turned up the reflectivity level to 0.943 so I could receive that very shiny and reflective look of a typical blade. As for the rest of the knife, I used a simple lambert material without changing any settings. I didn't encounter any problems whilst doing this as it's a very simple process, and by using my knowledge on basic features in Maya, I was able to do this.

I also created a bump map for the knife in Photoshop. To do this, I simply went over to Filter, 3D, and then Generate Normal Map. The only problems I encountered with this was getting the normal map level completely right in order for it to look good when rendering in Maya, so I was constantly going back and forth to experiment with different levels. However, through trial and error once again, I was able to get a decent looking normal map which I could then apply to the model on Maya.

The result would give me the images shown below. To apply this to my knife, I saved the files as .tga and applied it to the knife on Maya. I did this with the blade and the handle of the knife; the handle I did by simply creating small dots onto the ridges, and creating a normal map on Photoshop, which gave me the result shown in the image below. I did the same with the blade.
As this process very quick and simple, I didn't have any problems associated with it.