Realistic Hylian Shield - Scene Render

After recently replaying one of my favorite games of all time, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I couldn't help but be in awe of how great all the tools and environments looked. One of my favorite pieces of gear in the series would have to be the Hylian Shield, and in doing everything with it from parrying attacks to surfing, I kept imagining how cool it would be to have one in real life. Immediately, I hopped on the computer to try to build one for myself, and created a rendered environment to really try to make it shine

To create this render, all you will need is access to Autodesk Fusion 360 (And of course a device like a desktop to run it)

To start off, we will have to create the main shape of the shield so that we can eventually customize it and hopefully render it. For many builds where you are drawing inspiration from and recreating an existing figure from say a video game in my case, a good idea is to insert an image and sketch out its shape. You can save any image of a hylian shield you find online, and insert it with the insert command (Make it a canvas).

Once you have this image, hit the purple "create form" tab and click the sketch button (As create form will let us shape this to how we'd like). Start a sketch on the plane parallel to the image, and then just sketch the shape of the outside of the shield, using the mirror command to make sure it's completely symmetrical.

With this done, finish the sketch and click the extrude command, which will give thickness to your shield (Because we chose create form, the extrusion will be hollow, which is alright), choose roughly 5mm of thickness and 4 faces. From there, right click and hit edit form. With this we will curve our shield to make it mimic a real shield. Shift and click the outermost 2 edges, hit the top view on the view square, and drag the arrow up roughly 9mm like seen in the image above. With these steps followed, you will have the main frame of your shield complete.

Once you've made this outline, you should see that a new "body" has been created. Our first step will be to combine both bodies, the original and the new extrusion. Go the combine command and click both bodies, and you'll know you've done it right if you see the green connecting line like in the photo.

Next up, create a new sketch on the plane as before and redraw the same outline of the shield, except this time use the offset command to bring it down into the "thickness" of the border of the shield like in attached image 2. Once you have this, you can start to draw out some of the rectangles and details of the border of the shield like in attached image 3, again using the mirror command to create perfect symmetry.

With this done, you can finish the sketch and once again use the extrude command only this time making sure to change the time of extrusion to cut and the side to symmetrical. Drag the arrow until you see the red afflicted cut taking a chunk out of both sides (Make sure the body you are cutting into is visible and the other one isn't) and go ahead and complete the cut. Now you should see your shield has a few holes where this previous design was. Then, make the invisible body that you didn't cut through visible, and use the move command to drag your newly cut body a few units forwards, completing your designed border. Lastly, use the chamfer command and chamfer the front face of your new border about .6mm to add some nice cuts and detail.

And with the body of our shield finally complete, we can finish up the design on the shield and change its appearance. We will create one last sketch on a layer offset only around .10mm off of the original one we've used as we will project said sketch a bit later. Once you have this offset plane, make sure the original canvas drawing is turned on, and sketch out the triforce in the middle and the geometric shapes around it.

With the shapes on the side fully drawn out, make sure to use the mirror command once again to ensure it's symmetrical (You can do the same with the two triangles on the bottom but not the singular one on the top, and there is no point in mirroring one singular shape). With this new sketch, click the "Create" dropdown menu, Project/Include and finally Project to Surface. For the "faces", click the indentation of the shield that the design will lay on and for curves, shift-click every line of the design we just drew. What should result is the sketch being projected onto the surface. With this done, hide the body the surface was drawn on, go to surface and using the patch command to fill in the sketch by clicking every line of each shape one by one (And make sure the lines you click go in an order, and not randomly clicking across the shape).

Once this is done for both complex figures and the triforce, click the thickness command and make sure each shape has a thickness of 1mm in the same direction. Finally, you can reintroduce the original body and add the last part of the shield, the red Hylian Crest. Since this has no thickness, the easiest way to put it on the shield is to use it as a decal. Go online and save a picture of a "Red Hylian Crest" like seen on the last image. Then on the image dropdown, select "Decal" and select said image, using the indented surface as the face. When you select ok, the image might be small and turned, so scale, rotate and move it to fit to your liking.

The last step is going to be adding materials and color to our shield. Hit the "a" key to pull up the appearance tab, where we will add some materials and color to the whole thing. Scroll down to the metals tab, select aluminum and drag polished aluminum onto the shield. Then find the lead, and drag satin lead. Next up, duplicate that lead and edit the new ones color to a nice cobalt-esque blue. For your blue, make it applicable to "faces", and drag it onto the intended shields surface. Lastly, duplicate your blue lead and change its color to a nice goldish-yellow, applying it to the triforce in the middle. With all these steps done, it is finally time to render it.

On the upper left corner of your workspace, change the tab from "Design" to "Render". Our first step is going to be applying your desired lighting arrangement. You are going to want to apply a lighting that makes the metals of the shield really pop and give it some realism. Click the "Scene Setup" option next to the color wheel, move to the "environment library" and play around with which lighting you think looks the best. After trying them all, I really liked the way "Rim Highlights" shaded and glowed on the shield, and ended up choosing that one. Lastly, as in "Breath of the Wild" you find yourself in many grassy areas, you are going to want to place your shield in one that replicates that. In the "settings" tab of "Scene Setup", change background from "solid color" to "environment" and go back to the "environment library" from before. Because we said we want our background as an environment, it won't clash with our lighting choice from before. The background you want to choose which fits the best is going to be "Field", which is prepackaged in every Fusion software. Once this is all done, you can finally move the camera around to find the Perfect Shot, and click the render button to seal the deal.

Once you have done this, you should have a fully completed scene of the famous Hylian Shield, taking full advantage of the creative features and lighting capabilities of Fusion360! All in all, this project was a very fun utilization of the rendering features in Fusion and a new challenge in my 3D Design career, which hopefully helped to inspire or teach you all something today. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my Instructable and hopefully you can take what I presented today and apply it to your own creations in the future!