A little side project...

So, I got bored one day and decided to sit down and do this. A little background information first...

It's a sword called Eluciator from one of my favourite anime series, Sword Art Online, or SAO for short. The synopsis of it is, set in the year 2022, a new Virtual Reality MMORPG is released called 'Sword Art Online'. 

One of the beta testers, Kirigaya Kazuto, as his in game avatar 'Kirito', goes online on the day of release, and finds he's unable to log out, as are all of the other 10,000 people logged on at that point. 

The creator of the game, Kayaba Akihiko, appears in game and reveals to everyone that they cannot log out, and if anyone on the outside removes their 'Nerve Gear', a VR headset, they'll die for real as the headset overloads their brain with microwave radiation. 

The nerve gear cuts off all signals from the brain and redirects them into the game, as their avatars senses and movements, so it becomes a truly immersive virtual world. They can feel, hear, smell and touch everything inside the world, except physical pain, because it is a game after all. 

The only way to log out is to complete the game's 100 floors and beat the final boss. Also, if their health reaches zero in game, they die for real.

Elucidator with polys

Anyway, back to the sword, it's Kirito's trademark weapon in the series, so I decided to try to model it:

For reference, I'll also include an image of what the sword actually looks like.

I ran into a couple of problems doing this model, chief of which was when I was extruding the sword guard, I wasn't paying attention to the rotation of the extrusion, so it came out crooked on the finished product. 

I've managed to flatten it out a little by moving the vertices around, but it's not perfect. You can see this in the third picture.

This was also the first model where I used the 'Attach' tool to join two mirrored halves of the sword guard together into one model, after which I collapsed the vertices to neaten it up and get rid of the seam between the two halves.

Elucidator without polys

I've also not used an orthographic view to help scale this, so the blade to hilt ratio might not be completely accurate, but I'm pretty happy with it as a whole. 

The crooked edges

What Elucidator actually looks like in game.