I was gifted this knife and I wanted to do a VFX shot where the the knife would fly out of my hand into a target and then fly back to it, in a kinda VR hand flick inspired way. I started out just doing a quick model without direct reference using procedural textures. When I had my DLSR back I took some HQ photos of the real knife and I altered the model to the exact proportions of the knife and projected the textures on to it. I did alter the textures a little to take out some of the lighting present in the photos and to add some variation in the roughness of the model based on the photos.
That said the projection of the textures and the quality of the photo textures won't hold up to scrutiny, but I was intending on animating the knife with a lot of motion blur and at high speed and as a double for the real knife it should hold up well.
projected textures
old version without direct reference or photo textures