Altenweg II Saber -a PsychoSith Sabers design

Hello Everybody, today as promised last week, I am pleased to welcome back my friend PsychoSith with his second saber design. This amazing saber was the inspiration for my Altenweg Shoto hilts I posted last week. PsychoSith as you may know is a fantastic artist with a great eye for details when designing hilts and this one is no exception. He posted this image on the Ultrasabers’ forum and it caught everybody’s attention…

The members of the forum were very impressed and one member commented they’d be interested to see how it looked as a full model and hinted that I build a 3D model of it. To be honest I was already working on doing just that so I could present some renders to PsychoSith as a gift so he could see his creation in three dimensions. Now, PsychoSith’s image is a flat side on view so there was a lot of  details absent (such as how thick certain parts were or was the hilt symmetrical or asymmetric) so I had to use some artistic license and make assumptions based on other designs. But I came up with a model and created some basic “studio shots” of it. Here they are…

Altenweg II studio picture 1

Altenweg II studio picture 2

Altenweg II studio picture 3

Altenweg II studio picture 4

Not too bad from one image! I had just learnt a new 3D modeling technique called “Face Poking”, yes that is it’s name, which allows a model part to be subdivided into smaller surfaces or “faces” and each face is assigned a “vertex point”. This point can be moved in virtual space so that the flat surface is then stretched up to form a pyramid shape. I divided the lower handgrip in this way and “face poked” the smaller surfaces and when those surfaces where stretched they formed the textured grip! However, it was the foregrip that I really liked and it had a beautiful scalloped cutaway to reveal the lightsaber blade within it. In PsychoSith’s sketch you can make out what appears to be some etching or panels embossed into the grip so I used the same trick I used on my Thor inspired “New Asguard Saber” to etch a tribal pattern into the underside of the hilt. it was whilst modeling this section I realised that it would make a nice saber in it’s own right. Other details include an emitter within the foregrip which is visible when the hilt is turned off and the activation switch is actually an elongated “Trigger” switch you can see on the textured lower handgrip. Now I think it’s time for a few proper “Glamour Shots” and take the hilt for a “spin”…

Altenweg II picture 1

Altenweg II picture 2

Altenweg II picture 3

Altenweg II picture 4 (Note the second emitter port)

Altenweg II picture 5 (Hm, I could make a saber from this!)

You will have noticed the saber now has a red blade and looks much more metallic! The saber had the metallic material in the studio pictures but there was nothing to reflect on it’s surface, so appeared matte, however using a background image the saber is shown in much better lighting and the metal reflects the surrounding image making it look more realistic. All in all I think PsychoSith did a fabulous job on creating this hilt.

And that I think just about covers this second offering from PsychoSith. I’d like to thank him for allowing me to share his work with you all here and I hope to post even more of his saber here in future. I will also be posting more of my own designs too of course along with my “Master Series” (inspired by fan favourite sabers). I also have that pair of hilts for the “Mysterious Character” from The Rise of Skywalker…and I may be honouring another YouTuber with a hilt! So a lot more to come in future posts. I hope you will return to see them, but for now thank you so much for visiting today, whether this is your first visit or you’re a regular, you’re very much appreciated…..Till next time……

(Phew, I nearly ran out of breath listing all of that ^^)

“Altenweg II Saber” is a PsychoSith Sabers design and is ©Copyright of PsychoSith Sabers. The Blender 3D model and animation are ©Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2019.

Altenweg Shoto and Darkshoto – Inspired by PsychoSith’s Altenweg II

Hello Everybody, I hope you all enjoyed my debut art collection last week. It gave me time to work on some animations for my upcoming hilts and I also managed to come up with a new design inspired by my friend PsychoSith’s “Altenweg II” saber he sketched a few months ago and posted on Ultrasabers’ SaberForum.com (I will be posting Altenweg II next week!). And this new hilt is a weapon known as a Shoto, which is a slightly smaller one handed saber used mainly for defense to block attacks while you use your main weapon to attack.

There was a section of Altenweg II that I loved and that was the handgrip with a scalloped cutout. I thought that part would make an awesome body for a hilt in itself so I set to work and built an emitter and pommel for it. Now the reason I liked the cutout was that I imagined the cutout would allow the internals of the saber to show and so I added a crystal chamber. The saber took shape nicely with sweeping lines and looked a little bit like this…

In this Wireframe image you can just make out the chamber sat within the cutout. The saber also has the “Choke Point” which is the thin neck that connects the emitter to the body. The pommel is made to mirror the emitter as I used the outer shroud of the emitter and shortened it slightly to form the part. I also added a neat three dimensional speaker/ventilation grille in the pommel. There is also some nice accenting ridges and colours on the hilt but you can’t tell that from a wireframe can you? You want to see some “Glamour Shots”…OK here are a few pictures….

Alrenweg Shoto Hilt

Alrenweg Shoto Emitter mouth

Alrenweg Shoto reverse view

Alrenweg Shoto Top view

Alrenweg Shoto Pommel with Grille

Alrenweg Shoto Crystal Chamber

I was quite pleased how this hilt turned out and I felt the lines swept nicely from the tip of the emitter to the tail of the pommel. I achieved this by using the emitter shroud as the pommel but I also shortened it slightly and rotated it 180 degrees so it was “upside down”. This created the illusion of an elongated “S” shape if drawn from the tip of the emitter to the end of the pommel. Careful inspection of the pommel also reveals my 3D grille I modeled for the speaker/cooling vent. The scalloped cutout from PsychoSith’s hilt perfectly houses my crystal chamber and switch section. And on the emitter and pommels I added raised ridges with a contrasting colour which I felt help define the sweeping lines. And as I have been tinkering with animations I thought why not produce a quick 360 degree animation of the hilt. (Again it is short as I am limited in how long these clips can be – but when I have time I am working on some special animations which are coming soon) Here is the Altenweg Shoto 360…

I also discovered that this hilt would make a good looking “Darkside” version too so I built a “DarkShoto” hilt with a reverse colour scheme and Sith red crystal and blade. And as I am an “equal opportunities” type person and believes in balance of all things I guess I had better post the “DarkShoto” pictures too…here are a few more “Glamour Shots”…

Altenweg DarkShoto hilt

Altenweg DarkShoto reverse view

Altenweg DarkShoto top view

I really think this hilt has a good balance of elegance and evil! It still manages to look good despite it’s evil intentions, plus piano black and silver is a classic colour combo. While I built this version I figured I might as well give it the 360 treatment as well so here is another quick clip, this time of Altenweg DarkShoto…

This clip shows the hilt from a slightly different angle which caught my attention to a detail that led me to produce a THIRD version of this design. But I will save that one for another post as it is inspired by and connected to a particular “watery” Star Wars character! I seem to be very busy with all these hilts.

I think that just about wraps up this post and I hope you enjoyed it. I have to thank PsychoSith for his original  saber which triggered this design. He is a great artist and I have more PS sabers coming soon (Alltenweg II of course next week). I also have a whole pipeline of sabers to show in the next few months including my KOTOR/SWToR inspired sabers, there is my “Mystery Guest” hilts which I teased last week with the “Colour Cube”, and if that isn’t enough I have my “Master Series” models to showcase! Speaking of which…

I hope you will return to see all of this and maybe more in future posts but for now thank you so much for all the support of myself and FTSabersite. You are all very much appreciated and please continue to comment, like and spread the word about the site. Till next time….

“Altenweg Shoto” and “Altenweg DarkShoto” are “For Tyeth Editions” designs inspired by PsychoSith Sabers’ “Altenweg II” copyrighted design. All “For Tyeth Editions” are ©Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2019.

For Tyeth’s Fine Art Gallery – Lightsaber Art

Hello Everybody, and welcome to the Grand Opening of my new virtual gallery of saber designs. It was suggested to me a few posts back that I compile a collection of some of my saber “Glamour Shots” to post and this weekend seemed a good time to do so. I have been very busy working on some animations and videos which ties up my laptop because when I render animations it takes all the processing power my laptop has. But I have a few pictures lying around my workshop and so will post those here today and there is a few new bits to show you all. So please follow me and enter the gallery….

First up is an early Blender 3D design and one I am surprised turned out so well as I must have made many mistakes building it. I call this hilt “Aquaman Bend”

“Aquaman Bend” a weapon for a watery warrior

I was really pleased that this design worked because I had a hard time working out how to achieve the “Bend” in the hilt, while making sure all the parts lined up after I had bent them! It also has a nice perforated handgrip shroud which when viewed from different angles looks like either Aquaman/Jason Momoa’s tattoos or the new scaly wetsuit seen in the sequel movie. Maybe Marvel liked the look of my saber and incorporated the pattern into the costume.

Next up is a design I made for my friend Lady Revan a member of SaberForum.com. Lady Revan cosplays as Revan from the Knights of the Old Republic computer game and also as Bastilla Shan another in game character. Lady Revan has been petitioning Ultrasabers to add a Bastilla hilt to their product line and so I built this 3D model to show them how it could look…and here it is…

Bastilla Shan staff for Lady Revan

Now the focus point of the Star Wars saga was of course Anakin Skywalker, the young boy from Tatooine who was freed from slavery but would later become one of the greatest evils in the galaxy, Darth Vader. He later redeemed himself in Return of the Jedi as he saved his son, Luke Skywalker, but Anakin had some dark times in his life and used a couple of sabers. I built renditions of those sabers and here is one of the lightside sabers he owned….

“Vengeance Saber” Anakin’s last lightside hilt

This hilt is the one he owned and used to slay the Tusken Raider clan that kidnapped his mother, Shmi Skywalker. Her treatment in captivity led to her dying and Anakin in a fit of rage killed the Tuskens, including the women and children. This act led Anakin down the path to the darkside of the Force and to his transition into Darth Vader. And Darth Vader had a new saber to represent his new darkside character and so i built one of Vader’s hilts (he had three versions, one in each film of the original trilogy)…

Darth Vader’s hilt

Ok, I am at the halfway point of my first collection and next up is the latest “New” lightsaber staff that we saw in the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker which hits cinemas in December (2019). The hilt belongs to a character that looks like a darkside version of the heroine of the sequel trilogy, Rey. In the trailer we see a short glimpse of “Rey” holding a double bladed hilt which then hinges open and forms a double ended staff weapon..may I present Rey’s saberstaff…

“Rey of Darkness” Staff lightsaber

The Rey staff is the latest canon saber in the Star Wars saga but I also have a new thing to show you all and that is a new technique I have learnt and been playing with. Now I don’t know where it will come in useful but I have learnt to replicate cloth in Blender. There is a function that modifies a flat plate and deforms it so that it bends and folds like a sheet of cloth. If that plate has an image pasted onto it  you get something that appears like a draped sheet (maybe a flag)….

 

“Temple” Saber on cloth plinth

New Steampunk inspired hilt on plinth

The two sabers above are resting on an “L” shaped block which I have draped with a “cloth plate” to make it look like a sheet. And of course I pasted my website’s logo onto it. Maybe I could get some towels or flags printed with that design to sell! You may recognise the gold “Temple” saber but the silver hilt is a model of a modified Ultrasabers Aeon. I modeled the Aeon so the members on SaberForum.com could see how that hilt would look in different colours and with different custom parts.

So I have been busy designing while I have been animating and here is a teaser for an upcoming hilt for a mysterious new character that will appear in The Rise of Skywalker. There are clues in the Art Deco inspired text, the colours used on the cube and the textures so you might be able to guess who it is if you search the Internet for images of new characters. And this mystery character will get two hilts in a matching pair. Here is the teaser…

I am nearly at the end of this post but as you can see I still have a lot more to come in future posts. There are the sabers for this new Mystery Character, my upcoming adventures in animation, more from my friend PsychoSith and his Saber Doodle artwork and if that wasn’t enough…there are the remaining “Master Series” hilts and more new original designs. I hope you will all return and see what I have in store – it’s going to be busy. But for now thank you for visiting my new gallery, whether this is your first visit to FTSabersite or you are a regular, you are all much appreciated. Till next time…

All designs and renders shown above are “For Tyeth Editions” or “Inpsired By” designs built and rendered by For Tyeth. They are ©Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2019. “Rey”, “The Rise of Skywalker” and all other Star Wars related names, logos, images and other material are Trademark/©Copyright of Disney/LucasFilm.

“Rey of Darkness” The Movie Clip – For Tyeth Animations

Hello Everybody, today I hope to show that I am always trying to stretch my skills and the limits of my laptop. And I will attempt to accomplish this by showing you a little animation video that I put together after thinking about my post last weekend. I built a replica 3D model of Daisy Ridley(?)/Rey’s new “Switchblade” double ended lightsaber based on what I saw in the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker. Well the fact Rey might have a red lightsaber made SW fans excited but not only that but it folded out to form a saberstaff,

Around the 1min 45sec mark we see Darkside Rey brandish, then extend her staff and I realised that static images didn’t really show my replica off at it’s best….it needed some MOTION! So I animated the opening sequence…and then did a bit of Video Sequence Editing in another section of Blender 3D. I’ll talk about this later in this post but first here is my little attempt…(it is short for a video but I have a limited laptop!)…..

YAY! My efforts paid off I think, at least the video played. Believe it or not, this little clip took about three days to produce, partly down to hardware and partly down to the fact my first animation I programmed incorrectly. As you can see from the trailer Rey holds her saber and the BOTTOM half hinges and swings downward, but guess what wallybrain did? Yep, I animated the TOP saber to swivel up and over like this…. but when I realised, I found I couldn’t just flip the footage as you would be able to tell it was upside down! So I had to re-program the animation and re-render the footage. I admit it wasn’t as difficult to do the second time but was just time consuming. I had already spent several hours merging objects in my 3D model to make animating easier (you can combine multiple parts into single objects which means each saber – blades, emitters, handles and pommels are each one solid piece). Now the saber hinged and swung downward like this…

That fixed the animation but I still had work to do to make a “video” out of it, and that is where the Video Sequence Editor in Blender 3D played it’s part! As the title suggests the Video Sequence Editor (or VSE for short) is a section of Blender that allows you to edit your video footage and add special effects and soundtracks etc. Luckily I used to be a musician so I am fairly comfortable using “Sequencer” style software having worked in recording studios. However Blender has a few quirks where things don’t work as they should or as I’d expected. But that aside after an hour I worked it out and I set about arranging the footage. This included adding an Intro and Outro plate (a bit like opening titles and end credits) plus I added a transparent overlay that had my Copyright watermarks on (sorry I have to do that but I have had my images and content used without my permission before and this helps dissuade such activity!). To do all this editing you have a screen where all the parts are represented as little coloured strips on a timeline and you can layer parts and move them about etc…the screen looks like this…

The animation is actually the teal blue coloured strip and the Titles and transparent overlays are the purple ones. You may have seen similar screens in “Behind the scenes” documentaries of film and music production. This is the “Cutting Room” as it were of Blender, and if Marvel have used Blender then it’s good enough for me! (The first Marvel Logo animation with the comic book clips flashing in the background, shown at the start of the films was done with Blender!)

So I can say “That’s a Wrap!” I apologize that there weren’t as many saber Glamour Pictures this week but when I tell you that just the animation alone has over 178 separate images in it you might forgive me! Trust me though I have many more new designs to show you in future posts including my “Master Series”, some new Episode 9 themed sabers and some classics….plus I have more sabers from my friend PsychoSith. Thank you so much for looking in on this post and for all the support you show me, whether it’s your first visit or one of my regulars remember you’re all much appreciated. Till next time…..

“Rey of Darkness” saber is a For Tyeth Edition replica and is Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2019. “The Rise of Skywalker” and all trailer footage, names, logos and related material are Trademark/Copyright of Disney/LucasFilm. “The Rise of Skywalker”will be released on 20th December 2019.