My Swordspeaker Saga series centers around living, sentient weapons. Each book introduces a new weapon with a different personality and different abilities or “gifts.”
When I went to my first convention, I decided it would be neat to bring a replica of the sword from the first book, Truesilver. So I got a 3D printer and hired someone to take the drawing from the cover and make it into a 3D printable model.
It turned out great, though it had a few issues. I’ve since created a second version of the sword which addressed the problems I ran into with the first.
But after I got Truesilver squared away, it was time to tackle the weapon from book 2, Rimewinter, a dagger with ice in its veins.
3D printing a fantasy dagger is not for the faint of heart. Read on to find out about the different steps, as well as some of the materials I used.
Get it together
The printer I used was a P1S from Bambu Lab and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
As you can see from the photo below, Rimewinter, being a much smaller weapon, only required 3 pieces. I printed it using PLA filament and I don’t remember how long it took, but probably less than 10 hours for the whole thing. After some sanding, this is what it looked like:
The blade was too thin to add any internal supports to it, so the final result is quite light.
I used a special PLA glue to connect the parts. I wish I could have gotten it down to two pieces because the biggest issue I ran into was smoothing out the joint between the two halves of the blade.
Using Bondo spot putty, I smoothed over the gap and a few other rough spots. You can see the fully assembled dagger in the next photo. The orange spots are the areas where I used putty.
All dressed up
For the final touches, I first put a couple of coats of Sandable Primer on the model. I absolutely love that stuff because it actually fills in some of the rough parts and layer lines in the 3D print.
After that, I used a straight metallic paint on the blade because the Rub N Buff tube I had went hard and I was up against a deadline (another convention) and didn’t have time to get a new tube.
For the rest of the blade I used regular acrylic hobby paints.
The most challenging part was getting the blue crystals in the guard and the pommel to match the art. It’s not a perfect rendering, but on the whole, I think the paint job came out quite nice.
While I actually created this dagger sometime ago, what inspired me to finally put together this article was a nice snow we had here this winter. Everything I had on my schedule got canceled and my city pretty much shut down. So I went out in my backyard and set the dagger on top of the snow and grabbed one last shot.
I’ll probably post a photoshoped version of the photo I have on my instagram account as well. I don’t post there often, but check it out for other photos of my 3D printing work as well as my books and other bookish/fantasy sorts of photos.
Lessons learned
3D printing a fantasy dagger was a fun project for me.
The dagger turned out very nice. And because it was so much smaller than the sword, it was much faster to print and a much easier project overall.
I discovered that metallic spray paint is a viable option and certainly much quicker than Rub N Buff.
After I did the print I discovered you can swap out the nozzle of a 3D printer. The smaller the nozzle, the more detailed the print. So, I think if I did another version of this, I might try that because there were quite a few little details. It also might remove some irregularities in the hilt that I never fully worked out. And, hey, it might even help with the gap between the sections.
I am also looking into maybe getting an airbrush to paint these models. My little paint brushes take forever on large models like these.
I’ve had a few people tell me I should try selling these online, but with how much work they take, I’d need a very different process to make that work. Lots of time and love goes into creating these replicas.
And more weapons are on the way, along with more books!
More on that coming soon.
Until then, keep your stick on the ice.
