Y’all may have noticed I like a bit of Warframe. It’s proven to be a genuine source of respite the past couple of years, and thanks to that I decided that this year I was going to TennoCon, the annual convention that developer Digital Extremes holds in London ON every year.
I’ve only ever been to one convention before (Star Wars Celebration) and since money is so tight I had to make some sacrifices to make it work, but once I was locked in I knew I wanted to do something special for it. The answer, of course, was a puppet.
Cephalon Ordis was the most obvious choice, but even then the design is so far out of my wheelhouse I had to carefully consider how to go about it. The answer was to bring him into my wheelhouse, and re-imagine the character as a Muppet. Thus Muppet Ordis was born.
The first decision to be made was how the head would work. In game the head raises up on a shaft and essentially floats above the body. At first I was going to play with that as a mechanic, but in considering other design elements I decided to go with a more traditional hinged mouth. This involved reinterpreting the design a bit as in game Ordis really has no lower “jaw” to speak of.
I was debating doing the whole thing in foam and flat patterning it out, but one of the major challenges in any replica or caricature is retaining what video game designers call the “silhouette” of a character. It had to be a very specific shape and getting it even a little bit off would skew the whole thing, so I instead opted to take the in-game model geometry and build out a 3D printed shell from that. The results were promising.
The challenge then was how to make him look like he was made out of Muppety fabric, and so began a quite meticulous process of using a strong spray adhesive to lay sheets of stretchy fleece over the surface. The original has a fair amount of detailing on the head so I made a reference to that with a colour insert, then hand cut some details like the black eye socket inlays in velvet and the small gold “beak” in felt. The eyes were 3D printed in two pieces, a black socket to form a rim and then the disc itself with a lid reference to be made in fleece.
The gold trim around the base of the head was a real challenge and it took several iterations to ge the shape & size right, even working from the in game model. Covering it with fleece was a meticulous process, and there was at least two hours of hand stitching to get it attached, but in the end it worked out. Ordis had a head. Reinterpreting the top gold bar as a tuft of Bert-like hair finished it.
It’s a standard rule of thumb that any part you think will be “the easy bit” ends up being… not. That was certainly true of the lower body fabric that I came to call the “shroud”. It *looked* quite straightforward, easy to flat pattern by eye, but once again it was a matter of needing to get it right. The question of what I was actually going to make it out of arose — at first I was tempted to do it all in fur, but that would have lost the shape definition and moved it further away from being Ordis. Instead I opted for white fleece on the exterior and black velvet on the interior, with a yellow fur trim, heavily styled and set. I think it gives sufficient Muppet-ness while still being Ordis.
At first my intention was to simply bring the puppet to the show with me and maybe get a few photos with the community. Then I thought: what if… I entered the cosplay contest? I honestly don’t think this silly little thing holds a candle to some of the amazing creations the cosplay community builds, so I applied to enter the just-for-fun noncompetitive segment. Much to my delight I was invited.
I’m writing this the day before TennoCon. There have been… developments. I’ll detail then in a follow-up but I’m greatly looking forward to enjoying the experience with the Warframe community.
Keep lifting, Tenno.
