I knew that when it came to making Merlins staff an organic look was not going to be possible since that would require learning sculpting so I used a staff from skrim (Aetherial Staff, 2020) as a reference on how to make a more hard-edge looking staff.
I took my microphone stand which is taller than me and measured it to see how big I should make the staff since wizard staffs are usually taller than people and then starting with a cylinder I lengthened it and extruded the top faces out on two axis since I cut the model into a quarter again to make life easier.
I then took those extruded section and extruded them upwards as I Want to make a cage for a crystal that will be in the centre which is what that small object will be.
I then created a stand for it by extruding and soft selecting then Created a gem for the centre of the main staff section and also created a ring for it unfortunately I did not document this part of the process so I dont have any screenshots.
Once I did this I then mirrored it to create the rest of the cage around the gemstone.
The last step was to use soft selection to shrink the middle which gave it a unique look.
The textures for the staff is the same wood texture I have been using for everything else and then I made the handle and the gemstone connectors metal.
The gemstones are basically a coloured glass texture with some roughness to give it that cloudy like look.