Tam’s Artificer Cosplay: BFG Urkog

Side note: this post was written at ungodly hours when I was either tired, tilted, or done. Expect moments of shit grammar.

Back in … the time before corona, Tam decided that he’ll at least try to make a costume. He’s had costume/cosplay ideas before — but they were pretty up in the sky⁰¹Most notably, the Akulva cosplay raised some interest in trying to do a costume that also does animatronics. Except I’d go for a different game than WoW and a different race than Tauren. But this is a big project and I’d better start up on something small.

Carnival¹²The European equivalent of Halloween, happens every tuesday 41 days before Easter. Kids get to dress up and test whether the bells of every house in the neighbourhood are working well and receive sweets and money in return. Because Tuesdays are largely inconvenient for this kind of activity, it’s also socially acceptable to do that on the Sunday — and to a lesser extent, the Saturday — before. of 2020 seemed like a perfect excuse to start working on a costume, in part inspired by … that Pathfinder wizard. So I went ahead, bought the supplies … and did nothing with it for two years because life gets in the way of things.

Fast forward to late 2021 and early 2022. It is 10th of February and the costume is more or less sewn! I’m not going to write too much about that — because that whole process was very high on #YOLO energy. There was no plan at all — and by the end of this experience, my cosplay is actually a mix of three-ish different characters.

The list of props was changing all the time as well: back when I was going for a wizard, the plan was to make a book with a sheet of e-ink paper that I can control with a glove. Later down the line, this was revised to ‘a crossbow with repeating shot’ — the plan for the crossbow was to have a 4 bows and a mechanism to trigger one bow at a time. This lasted for a bit, until I realized I never used AutoCad and that whoopsie daisy, it’s not that easy. Abandoned the idea. Got another idea for a spring-powered crossbow. Abandoned that for similar reasons.

Then, three weeks before deadline, I finally got an idea that stuck.

The Gun

According to the wisdom of /r/dndmemes, artificers are big on guns. My favourite D&D character — a goblin rogue — also has a gun. And it’s a d12 rifle. That’s silent. And it shoots fantasy laser beams. Powered by gems.

Yep, that ought to do it.

What’s good about this gun is that DM described it as “a little big for you” … so of course I ignored the part “it’s awkwardly big for you because you’re a goblin” and head-cannoned the gun as AWP but silent.

So let’s take this gun and give it to our artificer.

The good thing about picking an AWP — a prominent rifle in CSGO community — I can probably get a free model off some website and send it to my friend to 3D print. This is very friendly to my timeframe (2 weeks till carnival o’clock at the time). But there’s also a few problems:

• Wholesale AWP is not completely authentic to the gun that I want. I’d need to modify the gun.
• My friend’s 3D printer goes only up to 200x200x300 (mm). 300 is vertical and I am told that I do not want to go all the way up to 300.

I decided that the best solution is to re-design the gun from scratch (ish). So let’s do that.

The Design Process

Battle Plan

So here’s a bunch of problems right of the bat. I don’t have AutoCAD. And I don’t know how to model in Blender, nor do I have time to learn.

My friend helpfully suggests me to import things as SVG and then extrude.

So I open Inkscape. Guess what?

I turn to google and ask how to get a 3D model from a flat 2D bitmap. I am informed that inkscape can convert standard PNG images into SVG vector images. I briefly consider this option. After brief debilitation I do the math.

• Resolution of friend’s 3D printer is 0.1 mm (though I am told to aim for details no smaller than 1mm)
• AWP is 1180 mm long
• Therefore, if my PNG image is at least 11800 pixels wide, I am practically working at the printer’s max resolution. At that scale, I reckon artifacts of PNG to SVG conversion aren’t going to matter

These resolutions are within what my computer can handle with reasonable ease, and the battle plan is ready.

1. Get AWP screenshot off the internet
2. Trace it in GIMP
3. Design all the relevant parts and panels. Ensure they’re under 18×18 cm.
4. Save as PNG
5. Import into inkscape, convert to SVG
6. Import SVG into blender. Extrude 2D SVGs into 3D objects.

I will acknowledge this process reeks of xkcd/763, but hey. I don’t have the luxury of learning Blender or AutoCAD, so GhettoCAD it is.

As a side note: I also tried GravitySketch. Gravity sketch is convenient for quick sketches in 3D, but I find VR (or at least, GravitySketch) inaccurate for dealing with anything that requires precision. It’s possible that GravitySketch is not made for this, it’s possible that I’m just a noob. Steam shows 22 hours logged in about 9 months, which is by far not enough to know a program in-and-out.

The GIMP Job

To make things easier for me, I started by creating four grids.

The first three are 1mm, 10mm and 100mm grids. These are mostly there to keep a sense of scale. As said before, 1mm is the smallest detail size I can afford. 10mm is useful for general sense of alignment. 100mm is for “big picture” alignment.

The fourth grid is 180mm grid. The gun elements need to come in sizes that are this big at most.

After a quick trip to google, we get a picture of an AWP, as well as real life dimensions (as stated before — 1180mm long):

We paste that into GIMP and scale it up to 1:1 scale. This makes it easier to see how we need to cut up our gun.

Right off the bat, we can see a few problems:

• The body takes multiple squares
• The barrel takes multiple squares

The Barrel

I really want the barrel to be in a single piece, though, meaning 3D printing is not an option. There are a few alternatives:

• cardboard
• PVC pipe
• copper pipe

I have the tools to cut all of those, so the winner will be the option that will first fall into my lap on my trip to the local hardware store at the desired size (20mm or slightly larger diameter, ~1m length). And the winner was aluminium shower curtain rod.

The Body and Misc Modifications Currently on the Radar

The body problem is not as easy to get rid of — we’ll have to work around the limitations.

Another change that I can see right of the bat: the scope has to go. The rifle has 150/600 range anyway. We also don’t need the stand.

E-Disassembly of AWP

With the help of the 180mm grid, I manage to cut the main body of the gun in 6 segments (some of which will probably require more than one piece) and some face plates. I would rather try to use as little filament as possible, meaning I intend to have some hollow places in the gun. It doesn’t take long for the first sketch to emerge.

You may be wondering: what the hell is going on with the barrel thing?

Well, the idea goes like this. As mentioned before, the gun’s beam is, in game, powered by crystals. In order to make this gun a bit more than 1:1 AWP replica, I decided to change a few bits. Since the gun is shooting light, I thought it would be a neat idea to have something that looks like a weird telephoto camera lens mounted at the beginning of the tube. Inside the wider tube, we would have some space to put a stepper motor (or something) to simulate auto-zoom/auto-focus capabities of the gun. But there’s a problem.

Since the crystal is supposed to be the power source, the gem bay should be way back — before our lens. We could move the magazine way back behind trigger and the thumb grip/hole thing²³There’s a chance my terminology is a bit to a lot off. You’ll have to deal with this. I’m not a gun person. This is a problem, because I want to keep some empty space for a power bank back there.

Now, with some creative pseudoscience jargon bullshitting, we could absolutely handwave away why the gem is inserted in the place where it’s inserted. Something like “the lens focuses harmless unfocused light on the gem, and the gem modulates it in a way that deals 1d12+dex damage of the appropriate type.” Or we could try our hand at re-designing stuff.

I was about to make a note of that, but then the gun got an in-game update. I asked for a sorta-silencer that would convert lethal damage into knocking out the enemy. The DM provided me a second gem slot. Back of the gun is the only place where I could afford to have two gem slots.

I guess this decision is made up for me, then.

There’s only one problem: the stock is the only place with enough space to fit my power bank, meaning the back of the gun will get pretty cramped pretty fast.

The scope is still missing, but we’ll leave that for later.

But will it blend?

Conversion of gun segments from PNG to SVG goes on without much issues. Importing those segments to Blender, however, appears to … cause some problems.

SVG in inkscape comes with the hole in the trigger area. However, Blender for some reason think that that specific section is solid. This is going to be annoying, but ultimately not a big issue. Coming to this point was easy, so wanna bet I’ll have the entire model ready to print in an afternoon?

Three days later

… while “drilling” the holes is pretty easy in blender, by using boolean modifiers … there’s az whole lot of holes to be had. This problem is compounded by the fact that when you never used Blender before, the object picker button (that allows you to pick an object by clicking on it in the scene, rather than trying to find it in the object list dropdown) likes to hide in your blind spot for quite some time.

In addition to that, I’ve also been trying to design — in blender — some additional elements, that I had to undo and re-do a few times in order to get them just right. Or at least, reasonably on point.

At the end of the day, the result is … okay enough for Tam’s first time using Blender for 3D modelling. Towards the end, Blender did start singing the song of its people …

Turns out one of the segments was massively fucked, and it got borked up beyond reasonable doubt. I had to re-create it, and I decided that … since I was re-creating the objects from scratch, I’ll do some things that will hopefully simplify the geometry along the way, as I go. But because we’re too fine and highly to RTFM, we end up with this:

No, the model isn’t of this crisp black color. Those are individual vertices. Same for the orange square. And if you try to run any tool to automatically simplify the entire model for you, then … boy … You’re not in for a good time. Same goes for RAM — my paging file is currently almost bigger than a disk in my laptop in 2009³⁴Okay it’s not that bad, 320 GB in the laptop vs. ~100 gigs on the paging file. But still, that’s almost double the RAM used when I did the 20k by 30k map for one of the campaigns I play in. What can I say, I’m no stranger to doing very dumb things., my SSD is getting absolutely hammered, and my 2700X/2080Ti are currently producing enough heat to heat up a small city.

My prophetic skills are way OP.

Moral of the story: I should learn my tools.

But eventually, my model was ready and sent to friends with 3D printers. After a very painful week of learning on the job, the full model looks like this:

Other acknowledgements

Special thanks for Xur who provided me with some blender pointers throughout this project. He even tried his own hand at the design on his own initiative, but I couldn’t merge the improvements of his design with my file for … reasons. I did send him my then-current design (or rather, a link to the file on my attic server) to play around, but the server decided to take a vacation day while I was work. Through the magic of living 6 hours ahead of me, by the time I came from work and had the time to look at the server, it was already bedtime o’clock for Xur.

But boy, do I still appreciate the initiative. I just hope that the server issues are the last of technic— of course not, I already mentioned trigger section problems that I only solved late Friday evening — a whole day after the server went down.

Haha 3D printer go brr

When I was giving finishing touches to the trigger segment of the gun on Friday, 1 week before the “deadline,” I was already almost a week behind my schedule. This is a problem. But I knew that the entire thing will be late, so I took the finished parts of the gun (the two segments with barrel support) and sent them to a friend with a 3D printer as early as Tuesday (and the friend got to 3D printing bit on Thursday morning). One would think that at least I could console myself with the fact that “yeah, I already sent some bits to my friend with the 3D printer and he started printing them on Thursday, so surely there are still chances for finishing the thing on time, right?”

On Saturday — with only a week left to finish the thing on time — I get informed that ‘sorry, that’s two failed prints so far, [some issue with plastics not sticking properly to the base plate]’. And just like that, my plans switched category from “Vulnerable” all the way to “Critically Endangered”. That is with me asking two people to print things for me.

But at the end of the day, I managed to get the parts by Friday evening … but that’s when my foresight ended and trouble began. The two parts from the front of the gun ended up mildly warped, so I decided to fall back on wood for that part. Other prints were (seemingly) okay, however, and things were going according to the plan.

Gun Assembly (part 1)

It’s early saturday morning. I wake up on about 6 hours of sleep (after painting my cloak/cape until about 330) and start removing supports from the 3D prints. And oh boy, turns out there are some things that I didn’t think this through.

Not the only example of oopsie whoopsie, but the one that took the longest to rectify because holy shit. I swear, supports can be stronger than the rest of the print even when they aren’t wedged in dumb ass spots like this. But through the magic of still living with my parents because lmao housing market, I fortunately have access to some power tools.

With machine mounted like that, I can just turn it on, lock the trigger, and move the piece around until all the supports are drilled out of the models.

After the supports are drilled out, it’s time to see if the parts fit the way I planned. Fortunately, they do:

We can now spray-paint the barrel and the lens part that sits at the gun end of the barrel. I decided that this part is going to be darkish-brown with occasional speck of gold. After two hours of spraying (which is way longer than I had planned), I still had a barrel that had too many gold specks on it. But at some point I simply gave up on trying to get the correct amount of gold specks on there.

My painting experience was interrupted by lunch. After lunch, the barrel segments were done drying, but the body was still unpainted. I decided that I’ll paint the rest of the gun before going to bed, because I wasn’t able to afford to wait for the paint to dry before starting to work on the inner parts.

Installing shinies

Before I started installing the electronics, I needed to have the trigger body and battery body connected together. This is roughly where I discovered yet another instance of “boy I did not think that through.”

I knew I’ll be screwing gun parts together from the get go, and I even prepared the holes. However, the holes were most definitely not screwdriver-accessible. This was a problem because the holes were not sufficiently sized: they were big enough for the screw, but not for the screw’s thread. This meant I couldn’t just put a screw through the hole and then install a nut on the other side. Screwing those parts together took some mighty effort.

But hey, at least the screws are holding tight. All in all, I managed to fuck up in a positive way.

Another preparation step was to twist together some “gem holders” from the wire. But after they were done, it was time to start soldering. I cranked up the soldering iron to almost three times hotter than what was necessary and started soldering.

First was the gem part. Gem holder got soldered to some prototyping PCBs I had lying around, followed by a white LED under each. Since the LEDs will be powered by your standard USB power bank (5V), each LED is accompanied by a 100 Ω resistor. This is a few ohms higher than what it needs to be if memory serves me right, but that’s what I had lying around from my hobby projects back in high school⁴⁵I tried to get the correct resistors from a friend at the time, but 100 Ω was the lowest resistor he could get that wouldn’t fry the LED.

The next thing was a trigger. I decided I want a two-stage trigger, with second stage lighting up the gems (wtf why, nobody will see that unless I show them!). The problem with the trigger bit is that, as you can see on the previous pin, there’s nothing to hold it in place.

Good thing I bought superglue.

At last, I fetched a badly deteriorated microUSB cable from a drawer, chopped off the microUSB part of it and soldered it to the board:

Let’s do a test fit with the power bank. And let’s test if my trigger works.

Back to the basement it is.

For the ring, I got 10 red LEDs that I had lying around for ages. I soldered them in parallel, because having 2 wires going from the ring into the main body is much more manageable than 11. Because the ring was pretty tight, I decided to keep the resistors in the main body (also in parallel).

In theory, I could have replaced the resistors with a single 10 Ω resistor. In practice, I don’t have any 10 Ω resistors (or anything sub-100Ω), so parallel resistors will have to do. Furthermore, one of the LEDs was different from the other 9 and was shining a little bit brighter, so I decided to give that LED its own resistor and wire regardless.

In addition to that, I also decided to make my life easier by connecting a male header to LED wires and a female header to the resistor PCB, as it will make the final assembly easier.

After all is soldered, it’s time to test whether resistors and LEDs are soldered on correctly and correct any mistakes.

Hot-gluing took me a long time, because boy: hot glue takes a really long damn time to cool down sufficiently where I could let go of the LEDs. But at the end of the day, by about 4 in the morning, I managed to hot-glue all the LEDs in the ring.

After I was done with glue, I quickly went back into the basement, spray-painted the body and went to bed for 4 and a half hours or so.

Final Assembly

In the morning, I first finished the trigger (it only needed some rubber bands to keep it in the ‘off’ position) and wired the ring into the main gun electronics and assembled the scope:

We can now also test whether out trigger works properly on semi-real build:

Now we can finally put the gun together. I make my way to the basement. I put down the parts and admire the entire thing:

The observant among you can probably already see the problem.

Yeah, screwing the screws for the wood was … not easy. To make things worse, the holes for the face plate don’t go all the way through. Initial plan was that they would go all the way through, but I couldn’t find the screws of appropriate length. Solution was to add mounting blocks on the inside. However, the mounting blocks on the inside meant some of the screws couldn’t be screwed in because I wouldn’t be able to put on nuts (vertical holes were a bit bigger — big enough for the screw to fall through).

I solved this problem by reducing the holes a bit with a drop of super glue. That procedure didn’t work on the rear section.

Last but not least, it was time to mount the barrel. Unfortunately not without issues, as one of the supports broke as soon as I tried to screw it in:

Problem was fixed by supergluing the support onto the wooden bit.

End Result

And here’s the finished rifle. (Rubber bands are there to solve the ‘screw doesn’t want to stay in the screw hole’ issue).

Bonus Content

Here’s some pics of me with the gun, as taken by friends throughout the day. Face reveal time, but for real this time.