Ancient Short-Sword and Goron Rock-Roast From Zelda BOTW. 🗡️ 🍖 🪨

Hyrule is a land where even weapons and food carry stories, however few are as memorable as the Ancient Short-Sword, a compact, formidable blade forged from ancient Sheikah technology, and the Rock-Roast, a legendary Goron delicacy so prized that entire quests revolve around retrieving and protecting it.

In this instructable I'll go over how to recreate these two iconic items step by step.

(feel free to skip to step 19-21 if you just want to print the models 😉)

I hope you enjoy 🗡️ 🪨 🍖

1. Maya Autodesk
2. Fusion 360
3. 3D Printer
4. PLA filament

Thankfully both Maya and Fusion 360 were free for me to use as I'm still a student.

The First phase is to design the basic structure of the short sword.

The 4 main parts required to make the hilt are the :

1. Grip
2. pommel
3. Guard
4. Quillon

In order to make these parts I had to resize and shape several cylinders and cubes to get the shapes I needed for the hilt. Once I was done I bevelled all the parts at 0.9 .

This step is split into 3 segments :

1. Lower Back
2. Middle Back
3. Upper Back

Making the back was quite difficult as it's full of strange shapes that I had to create by manipulating the vertices of the different cubes and cylinders but I ended up with a back that I feel was very accurate to its in game counterpart.

Making the blade proved to be the most complex step due to the many unorthodox shapes that I had to create however I feel like it payed off in the end and I was able to make a blade that was pretty accurate to the in-game design.

For the details I really had to dig deep into my creative mind to try configure the complex 'Sheikah' designs from the sword. Fortunately I already had some experience doing this, especially from the previous step.In the end I was left with some pretty detailed designs that I feel perfectly imitated the sword from in the game.

For this step I used a feature in my phones gallery to get the the RGB code for the different parts of the sword. I then inserted these values into Maya's RGB sliders to get the accurate colours

Congratulations on making it to phase 2. Here we will go over how to make the Uncooked Rock-Roast. 🍖

For this phase I started off by making the main bone that goes through the rock roast by manipulating the vertices of 3 cubes.

Next, we need to make the glowing interior part by adjusting the size and vertices of a cube to from a trapezoidal prism.

Making the crust 😉 of the rock-roast (pun intended) was surprisingly difficult because of the many small rough ,edges I needed to make in order to get the rocky look I wanted from the different pieces. I think it turned out quite accurate to the game and I'm quite happy with them overall.

For this step I used the same method as in step 6 to get accurate colours of the Rock-Roast.

And with this last step we have completed Phase 2.

In this phase I'll go over the animation process and how I went from brainstorming to rendering the final final product, the Fly Through.

The most important part of the animation process was planning it out. This process honestly saved me a lot of time as I had a clear direction of how I wanted the animation to go and I didn’t have to waste time making silly mistakes when I actually started making the background and animating.

For the background I was inspired by the terrain around "Death Mountain" in legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. By manipulating the shape of different cubes, similarly to in step 10, in order to make a few boulder that will later hide the rock-roast inside them.

To add colour to the scene I used the same method as in step 6 to make the different colours for the boulders and floor.

The next step is to create the actual animation. This step was quite time consuming as the vision I had planned out was harder to execute than I thought, however through a lot of redo's, I managed to pull off an animation that I think is pretty cool and still showcases both the ancient short-sword and rock-roast quite nicely. 🎬

I hope you enjoy the Final Render of the Flythrough 🛩️

In order to make the Ancient Short-Sword 3D printable I needed to add supports to join the pieces of the blade together while keeping the main pattern of the blade clearly visible.

Here is the final model of the blade if you want to print your own, as well as the printing orientation I used. I also added the system preset I used for ALL of the parts I printed.

This my final model of the Back along with the printing orientation I used.

This is my final model of the Rock-Roast as well as the orientation I used to print it.

After some printing and a lot of processing I ended up with two models that I was very happy with, even though I didn’t manage to get all the colours of plastic I needed.

These are the final images and renders of the Ancient Short-Sword and Uncooked Rock-Roast. 🔥 🔥 🔥

This was definitely the most difficult project I've ever done but I had a lot of fun making it. I felt like I was truly able to push my 3D-modelling experience to the max and in doing so I managed to learn so many new techniques use tools that I never even knew existed in Maya.

This project was also the first time I had ever used a 3D printer and it made me rethink so many features of my design as I had to consider real life limitation like how the different pieces of the sword and Rock-Roast would come together.

It also gave a deeper appreciation for the amazing artists that designed Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild as I got to see all the intricate details they put into the different aspects of the game.

If I could improve anything I think it would be to use more colours of plastic when printing and to design each part separately so that it would be easier to print out the different colours and attach them together afterwards.

Ultimately this Instructable was a lot of fun to make and it felt incredible seeing an idea spring from my mind and take a physical form.

I hope you enjoyed my Instuctable journey as much as I did ! 🥳