For this project, a friend who was doing a live-action movie wanted me to model a sword "kind of like the sword in Soul Calibur". I didn't really think much of it, but I found it to be a great opportunity to experiment with modeling and texturing.

And this is what I came up with. I experimented with plugging the sampler info node into the facing ratio of a ramp shader. I also plugged a noise filter into the v coordinate into the ramp to get the glass effect on the material.

To get the glow of the sphere in the center of the sword, I plugged the sampler info node into the material just like the glass material, except I made the outermost value transparent, and the innermost value white.

This is the wireframe of the model. It was really interesting to model.