If you’ve watched the Game of Thrones pilot episode, “Winter is Coming” and Episode 9 “Baelor” you may recognize this weapon. This is House Stark’s ancestral Valyrian Great sword Ice, wielded by Eddard Stark, The Head of House Stark and Lord Paramount of the North. This great sword was used notably in the show to execute the Night’s Watch Deserter Will, and was later used by the Royal Executioner Ser Ilyn Payne to take Eddard’s head, it was then melted down and reforged into two swords after war was declared between the Lannisters and Starks.
The “Ice” was a challenge, as even for a fairly basic sword, there are almost no clean extrusions on the model. Almost every feature was created using some sort of surfacing tool. The blade of the was creating using 4 separate sweeps to create the beveled edge of the blade at the tip. The original one was swept across the top, then mirrored twice to create the bevel on all edges of the sword.
Next was creating the entire cross guard. Starting with the quillon block. The basic shape was drawn out in a sketch then extruded, adding fillets to the front, and champers in the back. The brass knobs on the end of the Quillons were next to be modeled. Creating the rounds, and circular pattern at the end. At this point the quillon block had a strange shape to its face, and the knobs were circular in shape. As such, a loft was created to seamlessly join the two faces together. With one side of the cross guard finished, I simply mirrored the features across the YZ plane to get it on the other side.
Creating the handle and pommel were much easier than the Quillions and the Quillion block. I created a small extrusion out from the block to start the handle. Then a loft to again seamlessly join the different faces of the extrusion and handle. Revolving a sketch gave me the contoured handle, and another loft joined the handle to the brass pommel. The pommel itself was extruded as one large 2D Sketch, with the fillets added afterwards. and the top two rounds added with the revolve tool to get them in the right place.
From there materials were added, and rendered. The only real inaccuracy with the model was perhaps the pommel may be thicker than it should be. There were no drawings of this weapon to speak of, so this was very much an “art project”. A very good looking one by the end.
