Horn of Gondor

 The Horn of Gondor only features in the Lord of the Rings films at two pivotal moments. Once when it is used by Boromir to call for help from the Fellowship and another time in the hands of his brother, Faramir, as a confirmation of Boromir's death. However, the Horn is much more important within the books and throughout the history of Middle-Earth as Boromir sounds it multiple sounds and it has unexplained effects on his enemies as well as the legend stating that it could be heard throughout Gondor, when sounded. All of this has made me think it would make a great collectable because of its deep lore and long timeline.

I found an artist's interpretation of the horn, side-on, that I felt best reflected the versions I knew would be commonly recognised

The shape itself was easy enough to model without any complications so I decided to make the inside hollow as the real horn would be.

Creating the decoration was much hard harder than I anticipated. Because of the angle of the horn it was difficult to make one piece and duplicate and rotate around to the right place but the most difficult part was the warped dimensions of each decoration.

Due to the shape of the horn, the underside was longer meaning the decorations had to be stretched to fit within the constraints of the silver bands that line the gold trim.

This meant that each duplicate around the rotation of the horn had to be altered manually to fit the shape and properly match the design of the horn. Luckily it could be easily duplicated on the Z axis because that was the only symmetrical axis of the asset.

Starting from the largest gold band I created many of the parts individually apart from the bars that sweep down and connect the two circular bars at the top and bottom. This proved the most difficult to match up on each size because of the distances. The soft select tool helped a lot when adjusting and warping each item.

I then moved to the mouthpiece section as it had less parts and was less intricate. Still using the soft select tool I was able to make one of the arrow shapes and adjust it to fit the curve.

Moving to the final band, I was able to create one of the crosses and duplicate it around the shape of a cylinder. As each pair of bands was quite close together the distance warping was not an issue this time. The crosshatched arrow shape was a little more difficult but not impossible with soft select.

I initially was not considering making a rope but after learning how simple it was, I thought it would really bring the whole asset together. I extruded 4 cylinders along a CV curve, adding a twist to the extrusion giving the effect of a twined material.

After moving into substance, I used the image at the top of the blog and a merchandise image that assisted me when modelling the details.

The gold and cobalt materials were my main two. Brass didn't quite have the glint I needed and because of the regal status of Gondor, gold fit quite well. The cobalt gave me the perfect blue tint on the metal that silver couldn't quite accomplish.

Because of the intricacies of some of the details, some of the shadows and hardness of the faces was lost in substance so I manually painted on some occlusions with darker variations of the same metal colour.

The Bone smart material was perfect for the main piece of the horn and even came with a great polished effect that I thought I might have to create myself. I duplicated it, made it darker and, using a black mask, was able to paint the dark patch toward the mouthpiece.

After seeing the completed model, I thought it needed a bit of extra colour ,so I went back into Maya and added a small leather strap to the rope. This allowed me to add some dark red leather that matches Boromir's bracers, an important item in the series. In my opinion this really helped complete the asset as a personalised collectable.

The strap I decorated with an imprint of my interpretation of the feather-like Gondorian armour plating and the Tree of Gondor symbol.

I am definitely happy with the final result and think this makes a great addition to my collection. The personalised features bring the model together and adding the few last minute details helped even more. It was a difficult shape to work with and made the time required a lot higher but I am certainly happy with how it turned out.