Thursday, October 4, 2012

Angel Sword

Hey bloggers! It's been a while since I've updated (and worked with anything 3d, for that matter!) but I did finally get some time to work on a sword. The idea was to make a Dark Angel themed weapon that could also be used on other miniatures. My first attempt was not impressive and was too animeish:




Never one to give up, I archived it and started fresh. First I broke up the parts of the sword into multiple components for future use (something I have been reminding myself that I need to do. This gave me a pommel, grip, cross guard, and blade. The blade and cross guard I started working on immediately to get something that fit:





Though Dark Angels traditional have a back-swept cross guard, I decided to go with the more forward and out-swept version.

With this complete, I added the grip and imported a few pictures for reference. I measured them out and scaled them to the proper size:




The grip is, of course, too long, but that will be fixed in a bit. I added the swords name "Atera Vigilantia" [sic]. Unfortunately, the spelling was off. The words are raised from being 3d text:



I then embedded the text into the blade so it looked like an engraving:



I shortened the grip and referenced the size again to see if I was on the mark:





Much better!

I created the pommel and the sword was complete:


Total time was around 5 or 6 hours. I used a method called projection to make the cross guard. I'll probably make a full entry/tutorial about it as my blog ramps back up. Until then, you can see some of my work on livestream (including the projection) on LiveStream.

Until next time!

3 comments:

  1. I always enjoy seeing your process. The blade turned out nicely! I'm hoping that one day Shapeways will be able to print a smooth surface.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! Hopefully they'll invest in the newer 16 micron machines. FUD (Fine Ultra Detail) is nice, but the striations are a bit of a turn off. Still, they're constantly working on the community (both for sellers and buyers) so there may be some good production updates in the future.

      Delete
  2. Pardon, that should be "Frosted Ultra Detail" not fine.

    ReplyDelete