BOTW Guardian
A finished 2017 build — 3D printed, poseable, and lit BOTW Guardian replica with Arduino-driven movement.
This project is finished — the Guardian still sits on my desk to this day.
Back in 2017, when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out, I was immediately intrigued by the Guardian enemies. I was into making replicas from whatever popular media caught my interest, so I naturally ended up working on a Guardian. First came a ”decayed” or dead version that did not move — a proof of concept to see if I could adapt a game model into something genuinely 3D printable. It worked a charm, so I embarked on a months-long journey to design all the moving parts needed to make a Guardian actually move.
It does not walk around, but its legs are movable by hand and can be posed. On grippy surfaces it can even stand. Its head and mid section do rotate, with the same signature in-game movement. It also lights up — neck and eye included.
Additional info
Highlights
- 2017 BOTW Guardian replica — dead proof-of-concept first, then months of movable, lit design.
- Game extract → printable mesh: hand-rebuilt geometry, no normal-map shortcuts.
- Arduino, stepper motors, LEDs, and C firmware — head, body rotation, and lighting close to in-game.
The project started by extracting the actual game models from the game files, then meticulously reworking them into 3D printable objects. Games optimise everything — anything unseen is removed. These models had no connecting or moving parts; it was all facade, as it often is in games.
I loaded the meshes into Blender, rescaled them, and added detail by hand — there is no cheating with normal maps and bump maps in real life. I repositioned thousands of vertices and added countless polygons. Then I printed the parts, assembled the body, and still was not done: they needed to move and light up. I picked up Arduinos, stepper motors, LEDs, and wires and started soldering. When the hardware was in place, I wrote a simple C program to drive the stepper and LEDs in a way that closely matches the game’s animations. It worked well.
