And lo, my con season comes to an end. MegaCon Manchester was the last for me this year, with nothing for the next few months. Plenty of time to rest, recover and start making stuff for next year!
I’ve had a fantastic time with all the events I’ve made it to. MegaCon in January was such a (good) throwback to how earlier cons felt. MCM in May surprised me as how less crowded it felt (and convinced me I don’t need to be there at 8:30am 😂). Fantasy Forest was everything I wanted out of a festival in a forest and of course MegaCon Manchester continues to have one of the best atmospheres at a con. I’m hoping to attend most of these again in 2025 as well as add in a few more. Next years calendar is going to look pretty busy!
So far the only event I’ve confirmed is MegaCon London in January, but I there are plenty more I have plans to attend:
Secret con! There’s one in march but I don’t think I’ll have the costume I want ready for that. There are others at different locations so I’ll be keeping my eye out for them. Might be a combo of photographer/cosplayer, depends on the location.
Either MCM May or MCM October. My preference is for October as it’ll fill in a gap at the end of the year. May usually has the better weather though which still tempts me.
Fantasy Forest. I had so much fun there and absolutely want to do it again.
MegaCon Manchester. The old fav. It’s got such a great atmosphere, very relaxed and close enough I can get ready at home.
Asylum. The big steampunk event in Lincoln, I haven’t been in years and it’s apparently a big birthday celebration for it next year!
Camp Cosplay. No one I knew got space in April and so I’m hoping for more luck in September!
I’d also like to get a few more location shoots in so I’ll be scouting out places I can go/stay over to do them.
I’ve got two costumes (at least) lined up for debut next year. The first is a Legend of Vox Machina Vax’ildan that I’ve bought the pattern for. I’d wanted to make it for a while but couldn’t get myself into the planning head space, so this allows me to skip most of that step. I’m still going to need to scale it, but at least all the bits are there!
The second, and much, much bigger build is a new Aloy! Forbidden west has a lot of interesting armour designs, but the one that I think looks the best1 is the Carja Behemoth Trapper. It’s such a gorgeous design, with amazing colours, good armour detail and best of all looks comfortable to wear2. I’ve no idea how long it’s going to take and so I’m not putting a deadline on it. I’ve plenty of other cosplay’s to wear and I want this to be as accurate and well made as I can get it!
And conveniently works really well for my discovery that laying traps is a solid strategy for taking down heavy hitters quickly. ↩︎
The shield weaver armour is cool in terms of design but really not cool when it comes to how hot it is to wear. ↩︎
When I started playing Horizon: Forbidden West I was happy to see that the armour that I’d had inspired me to make a cosplay of it was still in the game, attmiedly under under a new name1. Curious, I took a good look over to see what changes they’d made. Most were small, but there was one change that immediately caught my eye.
See, the Zero Dawn version of the outfit has a bunch of pipes that wrap around the torso . It looks great in the game, but in real life it does not work quite as well. They were an nightmare to build2, wearing them was uncomfortable, and they took up a ton of space in my case when brining it to a con. Ah ha, I thought, this is an opportunity to get rid of those pipes, free up some case space and hopefully make it more comfortable to wear.
I used the photo mode in the game to take some screenshots so I could get a look at multiple angles. The changes were largely cosmetic, with the biggest changes to the torso, quiver and headpiece. I was planning to re-use/modify as much as I could.
I’ve highlighted in this picture the differences. Nothing huge - some colour changes, a new quiver, the torso is now pipe-less and there’s a new colour scheme/design for the head piece.
Given these are mostly minor changes and I now have a 3D printer at my disposal I thought I’d try and get it updated for MegaCon in Manchester.
Rather than model the headpiece from scratch myself3 I bought an exiting STL from Etsy. I was working on this alongside my Fantasy Forest costume so time was not on my side (foreshadowing for later!).
It was printed in the PLA that came with the printer as at the time that’s all I had. Settings were simple, 0.2mm with 4 walls to give it some extra strength.
I was really impressed about how good it looked. It’s PLA so I couldn’t sand it, but I could slap on some flexible filler and sand that to hide the worst of the print lines. Later prints will be in PETG that’s more robust and can be sanded better, with the goal to maybe use ASA if I can get a craft room with sufficient ventilation.
Priming involved the same stuff I used for foam as I had it in, that worked well enough even when brushing. I used canned spray paint (for speed) for doing most of the block colours. The white layer worked well, but the gold came out super thick and never really dried. There’s fingerprints and squished bits all over the place! One blackwash and drybrush later it looked significantly more worn. I re-used the strap from my old head piece and it was ready to wear.
I wished I’d tested it though as I may have noticed in advance that the front prong dug into my forehead. After a day of wearing it I had a headache and a dint in my forehead that took three days to fade.
I’ve lumped these together as there’s not much to talk about. The piping layout was similar, with a colour change to metallic blue for one and a replacement of the top bit of another with a rope-like cable. Rather than remake these, I simply repainted and in the case of the rope-cable, add diagonal lines with a dremmel to fake the texture.
The belt colouring is now blue, so I re-used the same spray paint I used for my Master Sword on the existing belt, wiping off the edges to give it a worn look.
Lastly, I reused the pouches from the older version. They weren’t in great shape as I’d also stolen them for my Fantasy Forest outfit but they’d do for one more outing. They’re unfortunately victims of the material I made them out of, a faux leather that I initially had high hopes for and now realise is the wirst I’ve ever worked with. The plastic layer that gives the “leather” look is incredibly thin and things like bending it, holding it or even just heat cause it to degrade and peel off the fabric backing.
I took apart the older torso piece and used the vest the pipes where attached to as a template for its replacement. I had to add more length to the vest on as the cable bundles took up much more space than the pipes did4, and meant I’d not need to thsirt I used to wear under them. The flat cable bundles were 2mm EVA foam I scored lines into and painted black, then sewed into place. The metal bits where again EVA foam, but 5mm cut to shape and sprayed silver.
I had to rush making this and it shows. The cable bundles are too short, something that only became obvious once attached and left big gaps. I also painted the metal bits at about 10pm the night before the con, which is obvious when you see at the missing paint and finger marks. I’m probably going to redo the foam aspects of the torso before I wear the costume again.
You can see where I had to move the silver elements further out because I got my measurements wrong. In my defence it was about 11:30pm by this point!
I didn’t get around to doing these so I just reused the existing ones from the Shield Weaver. The quiver is in real bad shape now though and barely lasted through to end of day at the con. I think it was held on only by friction at the end!
Do I think that the changes I made improved the costume? I’d say yes, but it still needs more work. The torso is much easier to move around in and did substantially improve the silhouette.
It’s unfortunately going to need another overhaul before I next wear it to fix the issues caused by me rushing it, as well as to fix a bunch of minor issues that have crept in due to general wear and tear. I’m also going to limit wearing it to the cooler parts of the year - it does not breath well and on a sunny summer day I felt myself being slowly cooked!
Here it is in all its updated glory!
Minus the admittedly overpowered shield system. RIP to me, now I have to learn to dodge 😂. ↩︎
I had to re-work the entire thing multiple times and I remember being only days away from the con desperately trying to get it finished. What I wore had un-hemmed edges and loads of messy glue visible! ↩︎
I debated re-working my old one but I’m too proud of the painting I did to get rid of it. ↩︎
Though this is more because the pipes where not positioned correctly on the original, they where always too high up. ↩︎
I used Fantasy Forest as the excuse to do something I’d wanted to for a while: Make some wings! I went with a dragonfly, partly because I really like the style and partly because the costume I was going to make initially had a dragonfly aesthetic1.
The plan was at first to make the wings out of wire. I made in initial template in Inkscape by scaling an image up and tracing the major lines I wanted to lay the wire on. Unfortunately for me, bending the wire (or at least the wire I used) was taxing on my fingers (especially with all the other crafting I was doing), and the wire itself was difficult to get into a shape that lay flat. I imagine with more patience, better wire and a less complex design it’d work better. If you’re interested in using wire the tutorials I used as a basis can be found here and here. Even if you’re going to 3D print like I did, it’s worth reading both as I take a lot of inspiration from them.
You can already see the wire lifting off the paper.
I’d already got a basic design in place for the wire wings so I could use that as a basis for my 3D printed ones. I traced the outlines of each shape that I wanted to be a solid element, joining them together using the union function in Inkscape when I thought they were the right size. If a shape looked a little thin I used the expand path function to widen them until it looked right. I was looking for roughly 5mm in width across most of the shapes structure.
The wings, at full size, are way too big for my printer to handle - the width was somewhere around 60cm! To split them up I sized a square that was slightly less than the maximum for my print bed (which is around 25cm^3) and used the square as a clipping mask. It’s a non-destructive process which allows you to tweak, though you do have to duplicate the wing for as many clips as you need (in my case 3).
✨ Smoj's top tip ✨
Think ahead! I unfortunately was not, so recommend at this step you think about how you're going to attach the wings and add in holes or mount points! I did not and ended up drilling each of them later (which worked fine, if messier than having them already in place).
The next step was to import the wings into Blender and convert them to a solid object. This was much easier than I expected as you can use the solidify modifier directly on an imported SVG file to give it depth. I wanted to keep this frame as unnoticeable as possible, so I only made it 3mm thick. Looking back, I’d make it thicker as it was a little too flexible! You’ll need to apply the modifier (I used the apply geometry option) if you’re going to do some extruding, which is part of the next step.
Given it’s only 3mm thick, there’s no way the glue was going to hold these together with such a small surface area. To increase this I made overhangs between each solid part the of the frame. The lower lip of the overhang was extruded at 1.5mm thick (using a loopcut) and adjusted to go under the other piece about 10mm. The overhangs used a boolean modifier and a simple cube shape positioned carefully using guidelines to chop the other 1.5mm away. Repeat this for every piece that needs to join together.
Export each of the pieces separately into .stl files, leaving you with 3 pieces per wing and ready to import into your slicer software.
Time to print. This is going to take a little while as with 3 pieces per wing and 4 wings you’re going to need to churn out 12 pieces. I used PETG rather than PLA for my print for a couple of reasons - it’s more flexible (so can take the bumps and scrapes), UV resistant (I’ll be wearing outdoors, less discolouration long term) and a higher temperature before it deforms (useful during transport).
The print per piece only took ~30 minutes, but I needed to let it cool so often went over an hour per piece. This wasn’t too bad, only taking and evening and a bit of the next day to print. Each was arranged to not require any support, though that did leave some obvious pattern changes (I have a textured PEI baseplate) that thankfully didn’t show once the film was in place.
I was really surprised how good it printed using a default PETG profile on my Bambu. I had minimal stringing and blobbing (as I’d dried out the filament earlier) though as the days went on I did start to experience some imperfections. I used default settings for the print at 0.2mm as they seemed to work perfectly for what I needed.
Ok, now is where I start to encounter some issues. PETG is an amazing material that, unfortunately, does not take to glues especially well. Superglue does work, but I’d stay clear of Gorilla brand superglue as it was markedly less effective than the Bostik (and Loctite) I ended up using2. You have to be patient if you don’t have an accelerator as the glue will take a very long time to cure. Try not to move anything and make sure you don’t glue it to the table (see my tip below for how to avoid that). The glue does bond strong eventually. In future I’d add some physical connectors to add strength to these joints rather than just use glue.
✨ Smoj's top tip ✨
Add a small bit of tape (I used black electrical tape) under the joint to catch the glue that pools and stop it sticking to the table. It's not difficult to remove afterwards either, and the black colouration helps if you can't because of too much glue.
The actual wing material is a surprisingly cheap and tough iridescent film that I got from an education shop online. Those places are a treasure trove of affordable materials for cosplay, and you don’t need to be a school to use them! This bit is simple - cut the film out with (plenty) of room around the edges, then coat with a spray adhesive. I used some that’s meant for mounting art to boards, but it gave a grey sheen to the film which dulled it a bit. Once it’s sprayed, place the assembled frame onto it and give it a smooth down to make sure things stick. Don’t add the second side yet, you’ve got another job first!
To really sell the dragonfly look, with all of the complex structure, I used a printed template (from the wire version) to trace on all the little details with a black fine line sharpie. It’s time consuming but the effect is well worth it. I used the first wing I traced to to the opposite wing rather than print out a new template, just don’t push down too hard and it works great.
Repeat what you did with the first layer, spraying and laying the film on top. Make sure you join the two film layers together on the outside to give it strength. I cut mine too short and had to re-stick the film multiple times as it’d catch and get pulled off.
Remember I said to make sure the outside film is sealed together? This is why! You’re going to take a heat gun and gently heat the film to shrink and crumple it a bit. This will introduce plenty surface imperfections that will help to scatter the light and make it much more dynamic with the colours than you get with simply gluing it on. Careful you don’t overdo it because you can crisp and melt it.
I wanted to make a backplate that allowed the wings to be set in multiple positions and be able to stay in place using magnets. Unfortunately, due to time constraints I was only able to achieve on of those goals and the magnets had to go. I used the diagram I already had in inkscape to figure out where the screws and holes needed to go, as well as the basic sizing. Like before I then imported this into Blender to give it depth using the solidify modifier. Holes where again cut using the boolean modifier, and the whole thing was mirrored to make sure both side where the same.
I made the mistake of trying to print the screws and bolts3 (so I could avoid the trip to screwfix across the crossing-deficient four lane major road), but the thread lasted even less time than I expected, with some bolts stripping after only one or two removals. Metal fixings are much more robust, and I’d recommend using them if you want these wings to last through many uses.
It took three versions to get a backplate that worked, with a total print time of well over an hour and half each time. I used some existing straps I’d made (2.5cm wide brown fabric), slotted through and tied together to keep it on my back. Crude, but effective.
At this point you should have one backplate, some wings and a lot of tiny bolts. Simply slot the wings through the screws and bolt into place! If you wear them with the wings out you’ll be unable to walk through doors and are guaranteed to annoy your friends by constantly hitting them with the wings. In the flying position they lasted all of 5 minutes before I got fed up and switched them to the downward position, where they stayed the whole weekend.
Here’s the Blender files for the wings and backplate as well as the stl files for the wings and backplate. As I said there’s plenty of flaws with them so I’d use this as the basis/inspiration for your own designs rather than printing them with no changes.
If you saw me at Fantasy Forest you’ll not have noticed this as the design changed radically from when I first thought of it! ↩︎
The container for Gorilla brand superglue has a wide nozzle for some reason which means glue just floods out. It also takes significantly longer to dry, possibly due to there being so much more of it! ↩︎
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