Project Yasuo: 02 - 3D model of the blade

As soon as I decided to  make a costume of Yasuo, I immediately started on a 3D model of his sword, using the reference pictures available on the net. Yasuo uses a long katana with a characteristic sword guard and pommel matching his overall visual "wind" style. Getting good and detailed pictures of the sword was hard so I had to improvise a bit here and there. There is also some minor differences between the splash art version and in-game model version.  I decided to base the blade on the splash art.

Yasuo Sword

The sword guard consist of 3 different parts, while the sword pommel is only one. Overall 4 separate pieces needs to be printed. However before simply exporting the object and push the print button, some thought process goes into setting it up for a good print. We all want the print to be as pure, accurate and exact as possible. All sort of things can go wrong, and especially to this object for following reasons:

• Size: The parts, especially the sword guard is large, larger than I imagined it. About 26cm across. This is without doubt the largest object I've ever printed. This will test how even my print area is and how the plastic will stick to the build area evenly.
• No flat surface to stand on: This is a huge issue, as without a flat surface to "stand" on, it opens up a whole can of possibility for things to go wrong.
• Slope: The slope of the object for some areas are really gentle, and might leave some very visible layers.

Preparing the objects for printing

Let's focus on these two objects first, the sword pommel and the largest part of the guard.

As you can see, there are (barely) any flat even surface for the object to stand on. Printing with support pillar is not really something I'm a big fan of because in my experience are too unreliable. If they fail (which happens frequently in my case) then there is a large chance for the print itself to fail.

So to find a way to be able to print this without support pillars is fortunately simple yet genius:

Split the mesh down in the middle.

Place the splitted parts with the face up. One should obviously be mirrored.

Print and glue the separated parts together.

Here are the layouts I used for printing. By placing them like sideways, and face up, there are plenty of flat surface which gives absolute great adhesion to the print bed. However The sword guard was too large, spanning 26cm across while my print bed is only 20,5cm. Solution was to cut off the "tail" and print it separately.  Then glue them all together afterwards.

I'm going to wrap it up for now, and I promise you unlike the project corvo where I posted a bunch of renders then left you all in the dark, that I have already printed the sword parts. An update will be coming on how they turned out! See you for now!

-W