Project Overview

I've been addicted to Satisfactory, and in celebration of it's full release this past fall, I wanted to cosplay as the Pioneer for MAGFest this year. Since this is my foray into cosplaying, I wanted to do something relatively simple. No electronics or fancy do-dads. I started this project back in late September.

The Modeling

I was a bit unsure about how to begin. I considered finding ways to obtain the game's 3D models or even figure out how to recreate the model from screenshots. However, a quick search to see what other's have done, I came across Punished Props's build of the helmet. Complete with free 3D files and a Bill of Materials. This has saved me an immense amount of time.

The Printing

Not including the print times, this has been the most time-consuming process. Daedelus (my printer) had run into nearly every problem under the sun. At first, the prints were coming out fine. There were minor issues, but nothing to be concerned about at that time. Suddenly, there were many problems like warping, skipped layer lines, poor bed adhesion, underextrusion, wet filament, and so on. To fix a majority of these, I asked my roomate to avoid opening the windows to prevent drafts during printing, I dried the filament, and I even temporarily put a cardboard box around the printer just to be extra safe. This worked for the time being, but eventually the problems started appearing again as if Daedelus didn't want me to finish this project. I decided now was the best opportunity to do a full maintenance and upgrade:

• Upgraded the motherboard to V4.2.7, flashed with Marlin firmware
• Installed the BL touch
• Replaced the bed surface with a magnetic build plate
• Added foam insulation to the bottom
• Added a Pi Zero 2 W with a camera and Octoprint

I was still having issues with underextrusion. Trying to remove the bowden tubing from the hotend, I found it was melted at the end. I completely disassembled and cleaned the hotend and replace the original bowden tubing with Capricorn and replaced the tube connectors with much improved ones.

This project hit such a massive wall of problems, it became a project more about maintaining and upgrading my printer. However, thankfully, this was all solved and I could get back to printing.

I now had about a week left to finish printing. Phooey.

The Assembly

To speed things up, while printing was finishing up, I finally bit the bullet and started assembling the helmet. Using a 3D pen, I had it assembled and ended up being a very satisfying process seeing the parts become whole. Putting on the scrappy-looking gray helmet gave me a sense of elation I hadn't quite felt in some time.

The Sanding

The other 90% of work. Not much to say here other than I used an oribal sander to help with the large areas and then moved onto using hand files and sand paper for details. I even ended up using a bit of clay to fill in gaps from printing errors.