Start your ‘Rings of Power’ cosplay today with this amazing broken sword

Amazon is spending almost a billion dollars to make its Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power, and we’ve seen highly detailed outfits and weaponry in posters and trailers. The cosplay community doesn’t have the same budget as a mega studio, but it does have a lot of imagination to bring these artifacts to life. The only problem is that Amazon is being a bit stingy when it comes to full shots of any of the accessories, so it’s hard to do any great things before the September 2 premiere.

Despite the dearth of reference material, the 3D printing community is already churning out amazing models to use in cosplay endeavors. While I don’t spend a lot of time at conventions (COVID is not my friend), I love printing weapons or intricate pieces of jewelry for my nerd wall. I also print a lot of cosplay pieces for my friends and colleagues.

Read more: The best 3D printers of 2022

Nikko Industries, one of the most popular designers of 3D printed accessories and well known for creating screen-accurate Mandalorian armor, created this model of the broken sword featured in those amazing character posters, and I can tell you it’s a fantastic model. because I’ve spent some time 3D printing it.

Thanks to theonering.net, we now know that the broken sword is in the hands of Bronwyn’s son, one of the new characters created especially for the show, and the sword is something of an heirloom. That rune seems to be dark speech, the language spoken by Sauron, so who knows what history he might have.

The poster only shows the front of the sword, further obscured by the hands holding the hilt. But Nikko managed to extrapolate a final shape and give us this model. It may not be exactly screen accurate, but it looks close enough to fool anyone. Even before painting, you can feel the roughness of the texture on your hand. If you’ve ever picked up a rusty piece of metal, you’ll know what texture I’m talking about.

When you get close to the sword in the poster, you can see that it was once golden, and this blackness is a kind of oxidation. Some of the gold still shines, and I had to take this into account when painting the model.

I printed the sword in 3D in a resin smoked by Siraya technical resin I was hoping it would be dark enough to look like obsidian. It wasn’t, but resin is easy to paint, so I didn’t mind the lightness. I used a large scale Elegoo Jupiter to print the model as it is the only printer I have that is large enough to print something like this in one piece.

I hollowed out the model to save material, but made sure there were plenty of supports. A great tip for resin printing: If you soak your model in hot tap water for about a minute, without boiling it, you can easily remove the supports without cutting them.

One of the great advantages of resin is the lack of post-processing required. Normally I would spend hours sanding to remove the coat lines, but the resin comes out perfectly smooth. I went straight to painting with a gray primer followed by a shimmery gold base.

I was blown away by the details. Throughout this accessory, there is a sense that it was once a majestic blade, but is now corrupted in some way. I used a light spray of black over the gold to achieve the same look. Holding it in your hand is a strange experience. It feels like a weapon, but the texture is almost repellant, adding to that corrupted feel.

I used Rub ‘n’ Buff, a waxy metallic paint, to add detail to the rune and deeper grooves, then gave the entire model a scratch. Weathering uses brown and black acrylic paints to dirty the entire sword. I even added some sand from my garden to dull the black a bit more.

The file is available to download from Nikko Industries for just $15 (£11, AU$20) and, at my suggestion, now has a removable sheet to make printing and painting even easier. Nikko even has a course that will teach you how to design your own 3D models in Blender, which is worth checking out. Cosplay can be an expensive hobby and learning how to make your own models might not save you a billion dollars, but it will help you a lot.

To give you an idea of ​​how close the 3D model looks compared to the poster, I went nerdy and did my best to recreate the look so you can see them side by side. I’m interested to know what characters you plan to dress up or if you’ve seen other Rings of Power models appear. I’m excited to cosplay the new human character Halbrand and his horsehead sword, and will also be 3D printing all the swords in the show over time.