Dark Souls - Dragonslayer Ornstein

Ikras

Active Member
So, having completed my iron man I've been bitten by the bug. Throughout my build I had far too many ideas going around in my head and I've finally managed to come to a conclusion. I really enjoyed playing through Dark Souls and throughout it there were two bosses that stood out in my mind as the most memorable. Ornstein and Smough (particularly Ornstein) and Artorias. After a long think I decided to go with Ornstein (Artorias maybe at a later date).



So, new project in mind I've started to think about how best to go about all the parts. I've collected a bunch of images of the armour set, both images of the boss and of players in the armour and have been trying to look at it from as many different angles as I can. I'm planning to stick with foam for the construction. I'd come across an incredible looking Artorias costume online (http://imgur.com/a/3TgJs) and managed to get in touch with the creator and got a lot of advice from him which was a huge help.

The current plan begins with getting round to making a duct tape dummy so I can start putting together some templates properly. At this point I plan to start with a 10 mm or 6 mm basis for the parts. I've been working on a lot of sketches to try and pin down the basic shapes and how the parts will all fit together. Ideas (and sketches where I have them) are as follows.

Head: After a long chat with someone I met at MCM Scotland I have a basic idea of how to do this. Firstly, it will not be a helmet in the traditional sense as I will not be behind the face. My plan is to set it up more like a hat with my vision coming through the teeth and the front neck area removable for ventilation and refueling. There'll be a foam hat framework in the center which will hold it on my head and then I'm going to build the structure up around this. I'd initially been thinking of using upholstery foam but more recently the idea of using pink insulation foam has come to mind. I still need to do more research into this.
For the plume at the back I've got a weft of hair from Coscraft to roll up and use. I'm thinking of gluing one end around a small section of a post to give it the initial height and strength then just let it go loose from there.

Body/Shoulders: I'm planning to do these parts linked I think. I don't see any good way to mount the vertical sections of the shoulders otherwise so I think they'll be permanently attached with maybe the dipping parts attached by straps if I feel it would limit my motion too much to have it all as one solid piece. I'm going to try and make use of layering foam as much as I possibly can to get all the pattern across it. The smaller embellishments I'm aiming to do in 2 mm foam and then the larger parts probably in 6 mm to give them a bit more presence. That may turn out to be too thick so I need to do some tests to decide for sure.
I'm not sure yet but I'm thinking of making a base shell in 10 mm foam and then layering all the other parts over it. I'm not sure if this would end up too thick though so I may do away with the backing idea and just try assembling entirely with the layered 6 mm sections. Again, I think I'll need to make some test parts.



Thighs/Biceps/Elbow: For both parts I have a similar ideas in mind. Basic structure in 6 mm foam with the detail probably in a combo of 6 mm and 2 mm foam. I'll mold the sections to my body and then have straps round the back to hold them in place. I'm thinking either buckles or velcro and probably some elastic strapping to allow some give. I'm not sure where best to connect the elbows but I'll probably look into some strapping from the bicep to hold the height but allow some movement.



Shins/Forearms: I'm most likely looking at 6 mm foam for these, possibly a little 10 mm in the shins for part of the raised detail. These parts will fully enclose the respective sections and I'm looking at having a removable backing with velcro down the sides to hold it together.



Sides of legs (Not sure what best to call them): For this part I'm looking at probably 10 mm foam just so they have the strength to retain the curve by themselves, could possibly be done in 6 mm with a lot of backing structure but I feel the 10 mm might be the better call. I'm planning to have individual layered sections all held together by some strapping down the back of them. They'll be connected overall to a belt that I'll hide behind the chest plate.



Combined with this part I'll also have a fabric backing. Most likely I'm going to use some red linen. Managed to find something that looks a reasonable colour in a local shop. Based from the advice of the Artorias builder I plan to weather this with some sandpaper at the edges of the fabric and test out a combination of bleach dye to give an approximation of fading and tattered edges.
Also attached to the belt I'm making myself some chainmail. I've done the most work on this so far and worked through a fair amount of reference detail. I'm working with some 1.6 mm wire I got from Screwfix (16 gauge in other terms I think) and I'm using 1/2" rings due to the availability of a wooden spoon with that diameter handle. I've given a test of two chainmail patterns so far, European 4 in 1 and also 6 in 1 and I think I'm going to stick with the 4 in 1. The rings will definitely be larger than they look in the game model but I think it would be a nightmare to try and work with smaller rings and I have a lot of respect for people working with 1/4" or anything similar.



Spear: The haft I plan to make of some wood doweling, exact diameter to be determined when I come to it. There's a shop near me that does a lot of wood so I might have a good look round there when I start to think about it more seriously. In the end I aim to have it split in two near the centre, probably with some kind of screw to connect the parts in the middle. The spear head itself I've been planning to do in pink insulation foam but it's just occurred to me that expanding foam might be worth looking into. In either case I need to work out how best to finish it off.

Overall I'm thinking of doing a full thin resin coat to give it a nice smooth finish, something I planned for iron man but ran out of time to properly perfect the coating. Gold paint and some weathering as well. Maybe have the eyes light up red for a bit of fun but at the moment this is the plan.

Currently need to get a duct tape dummy done so I can start to work out some templates for the sections. I also need to work out a source of foam with no pattern on either side. In the meantime I have plenty of chainmail to be making.

As always, any comments or advice is welcome.
Hope it's been an interesting read.

P.S. I've been playing with my image uploading. I've got larger images available now but if anyone knows how to make the larger image available without linking externally please let me know.
 
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Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Progress is still going, just somewhat slowly at the moment. The foam I'm aiming to use will be available sometime in January from what I can tell and I've not had the time to get the duct tape dummy made. I'm determined it will come this weekend though and then I'll be in a position to at least try and get an idea of some templates and what the scale will look like overall.

The chainmail has been the main point of progress. I've gone through 30 m of wire and have a whole bunch of rings and should get around 6/7 patches of mail (the same size as I've shown in the last post) out of it all. I'm planning to attach it to the belt compressed slightly so it will have a denser look to it. Again, once I have the mannequin done I'll have a better idea exactly the size of region I'll need for it all.

Looking ahead to Christmas I'm hoping to get an airbrush so have been spending a while doing a much of research and have kind of settled on one. Think it could be a great help with painting it all. We'll see.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Will be watching this build and look forward to seeing your hard work in person next year

An idea for your spear, to screw it together you can get one of the screw connectors for snooker/ pool cues

For the elbow pieces what about some elastic strips connecting the elbow pieces to the bicep pieces that would give you a range of movement

Am liking the chain mail i doubt the actual sizing will be a problem so long as it is light enough to wear all day it should be all good
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Nice work. You can find 3d model from the game (I think is from the game) here, somewhere, in RPF; I think helmet could be hard to model. Hope it can help. Chainmail is good :).
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Will be watching this build and look forward to seeing your hard work in person next year

An idea for your spear, to screw it together you can get one of the screw connectors for snooker/ pool cues

Cheers, hadn't thought of anything like that with the cues. Another idea I came across on facebook recently was furniture screws so I've got a few options to think about.

For the elbow pieces what about some elastic strips connecting the elbow pieces to the bicep pieces that would give you a range of movement

I think that will be the best way to go about the elbows as well. I have some black elastic so could hopefully keep it reasonably inconspicuous against the black undersuit.

Am liking the chain mail i doubt the actual sizing will be a problem so long as it is light enough to wear all day it should be all good

It's still on the go currently. I've found a way to get the rings sitting in a way which gives a much denser appearance and a good range of motion now. It's going to take a lot more rings and add a bit to the weight but I'm much happier with how it's looking now. I'll hopefully get some pics up soon.


Nice work. You can find 3d model from the game (I think is from the game) here, somewhere, in RPF; I think helmet could be hard to model. Hope it can help. Chainmail is good :).

Cheers for the comments. I've come across the helmet before and decided to try and make it into templates before realising what a task that really was. I plan to make use of them most likely for 3D reference models to help me get my head around some sections in the end and stick to an attempt at free hand.

A slight update, managed to pick up some fabric the other day which matches the hair for the helmet plume near perfectly. Think that the chainmail is nearing completion too so I'll be looking ahead to weathering the fabric and adding it the belt that holds the chainmail. Hopefully this makes sense but if not all will hopefully become clear once I make some progress with it.

Things are on hold a little at the moment as I'm working on a Cyclops costume for the end of Feb but I'm itching to get back at more of this.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

It's a bit of a lack of time and a bit of 'it's just more chainmail', I've got 7.5 out of 10 chainmail sections for the next layer sorted out. I'll still need to connect them all attach it to the main section but it is getting there.

Time has been tight recently though so when I do have a chance to work on something it's been Cyclops as it's part of a group I'm going with. I've got a good chunk of the visor sorted out now though so hopefully I should have some more time to put into this soon.

Really need to get some images up here though when I can find a minute.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

So, finally getting round to adding some of those photos I've been talking about.

A nice big length of chainmail now coming together with the eyelets I've been using. The section here is my original test. Followed by the full belt length.I've got a buckle on there temporarily at the moment.
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In belt form along with one shoulder strap for a test. I need to order some more strapping but the length looks pretty good otherwise. The side section isn't held up at the moment across the buckle as I can't add the eyelets there but once it's held in place it should match the rest of it. Managed to get a bunch of the buckles in the last image in the John Lewis clearance sale so I can hold the mail together down the side which will be concealed by the side armour.
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Final image for the colour match I managed to find with the helmet plume and the fabric (also from the John Lewis clearance).

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Sitting with another layers worth of chainmail patches to add in now and we'll see how the length is looking at that point. Got through a reasonable chunk of the cyclops visor today so should be able to put more time into this soon.

All input welcome again.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Alright. More proof that I am not (and this build is not) dead. While I have been plenty quiet here I've been working away in the background at it all. I'm starting to try and up the pace of the build (I know I've said that before) and this time I'm sticking by it now that I'm beginning to realise how 'close' my September target is getting. I've been keeping a little more up to date with photos etc on Facebook but I want to try and keep my updates here a bit more in depth, hence, I need to find the time to think about what to say.

So for now here is the first of my posts trying to catch things up with my progress.

I decided that as good a place as any to start were the legs and I jumped straight in with the shins. Never having freehanded/made templates before I put together something for the front of the shin. The plan was to then have an insert to make the back which would be held on with velcro. Straight away realised some errors.
Firstly: it was far too small. I think I must have completely forgotten the thickness of the foam or just relied on the flexibility of the paper or something. It was no good.
Secondly: 6 mm was too thin to safely hold the pointer parts. A stiff breeze would probably have bent them.
Back to the drawing board.

Attempt two was in thicker foam and larger. Assembled it with many undercuts and a lot of heat shaping. Had a lot of fun and was pretty satisfied.
You can see the two side by side here for comparison.
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At this point things were looking good so I moved to the back of the shin. Again sticking with good old 10 mm I adapted some templates I found online to get what I was looking for. All in all I was pretty pleased with the result.
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The plan at this point was to work out where to put the velcro on the front section to hold the parts together and attach some elastic straps to the front of the back section meaning it would all close nice and tight around my shin.
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First things first, I realised that the front part wouldn't wrap round far enough for my happiness. Secondly, I began to have doubts about how close a fit the velcro would offer. Thirdly, I wasn't so satisfied with the angle and join on the front part.

At this point I have a fairly reasonable redesign of the front planned. I'm going to glue it on, having realised that my foot will have enough space to get through if I put it on back to front then turn it around. I'm going to extend the front panel horizontally also so that it gives a more compete wrap.

I have both of the backs of the shin fabricated, awaiting the redesigned fronts now.
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(Not sure why this is turning up upside down but you hopefully get the idea)

To try and avoid any more sizing issues I decided to hold off working more on the front until after I've sorted out the thigh plates and the boots.

Hope you've found this interesting. Next update will be the thigh plates.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

It is looking good seems like you have a good plan for going forward. I will be following your progress perhaps it will inspire me to bring one of my more ambitious projects back from the death.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Thanks very much. Yeah, there's a lot of planning going on at the moment and I'm still trying to turn it into something more.

Thanks for your reply as it has helped prompt me into getting another update up.

As promised, here are the thighs. The general structure of these isn't too bad. A set of layered plates on the front of the thigh only.
This time round I was a bit more intelligent and made more templates, thought about the thickness of the foam (well...more than last time at least).

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After a bit of reducing the size of the knee cup I went ahead to foam and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

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Put the second one together after proof of concept worked out five. Trying to match the curves between them was one of the hardest parts.

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I've made a card mock up of the knee overhang but haven't put it into foam yet as I began to think about the 'height'/angle of this plate compared to the shin. I wanted to be sure that there wouldn't be any issues with them both trying to occupy the same space.

So, at this point I have the backs of shins and the thighs. Fronts of shins come next surely...?

Nope, started to think about the heights of the shoe covers and making sure that the shin wasn't too long.
So...next update will be the shoes.
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

Thanks very much.

The next planned update had been the shoes but I've realised that having designed them to have my shoes come in and out, they have turned out to be absolutely massive and just look terrible when taken with the rest of the legs. The general shape of the shins are good, as are the thighs but it's back to the drawing board with the shoes.

I'm most likely to get another pair of beach/wetsuit shoes and sacrifice them, as I did in iron man. Should be able to get a much tighter fit this way if I'm actually gluing the foam directly to the shoe and all I need to care about is if my foot will fit.

In the meantime I'm wrapping up the other parts of the legs. I need to make the 'kneepads' and have begun testing out my plans for the raised detail. For now, I leave you with my quick test of said detail.

20160501_122034.jpg
 
Re: Dragonslayer Ornstein

So things have been silent for a bit of time but I have been busy. As always I've been flitting around some parts as I realise orders of doing things that make more sense than what I had initially planned.

So, first off, I actually stuck to continuing to work on the leg details and getting that all together. I came across a tip on Facebook from EyeofSauron designs which I've been making full use of. When doing beveled sections, use the back side of the foam as the upper face. This means that you don't need to worry about smoothing out the patterned side for gluing to the armour section and you have a nice flat backside to start from. The patterned side is getting sanded down anyway so it's all good.

So to make things as simple as i could I started off cutting out the sections to be used for the shins and heat shaped them to match the curves I already had made.
20160503_070656.jpg

I just cut a general area at first and then drew the further designs on after as I couldn't think of an easy way to template it. In other words, these sections started as rectangles, were heat shaped to match the shins and then cut to the approximate final shapes you see in the picture.

I repeated this for the thighs/knees next. They were simpler to do in some ways but had their own issues.

Firstly, less heat shaping to be done, excellent. Secondly, however, it was much more interesting trying to match the lengths needed for the angled cuts and trying to get a smooth edge along the front due to the pattern. You live and learn. In the end I managed to match it using the flatter areas of the mat and by holding the angles relative to the section it was to be glued to. With that sorted, I then went about cutting out the inner edges for the pattern.
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I was pretty pleased really with how it was shaping up. This method does take a fair bit of foam that you can't reuse too much and I could have done it with strips glued at strategic corners but I decided I would rather be less efficient with this so as avoid having to sand any hot glue and wrecking my sanding drums (it just melts into them, making them all smooth and useless).

At this point in time I decided I would be clever and try and do as much of the sanding as I could in one sitting. So, these sections were put to one side for now and I started work on the side plates for the legs. I started these templates directly on the card this time after a lot of test sketches trying to get a feel for the shapes. I went full maths on it as well and loaded up the images on gimp so I could get relative pixel sizes between each layer. I used these ratios to determine the real world sizes for my panels after deciding on a length that seemed good. The resulting cardboard chunk certainly looked the part to me.

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I cut this along each division line and then traced it onto my foam directly. For these parts I went with 10mm to try and maximise their free standing rigidity. Initially, I had thought to put them behind each other but I rapidly came to realise that would add too much of a step at each level and the relative curvatures would have caused nightmares for me.
I ended up taking a method I had used in my iron man helmet and actually cut a thin strip out of the back of the bottom edge of each layer. I didn't measure it exactly but it was close to 5mm. This allowed me to inlay each level into the previous panel. In order for this to work, it required an extra 'tab' above the top edge of templates I made but it wasn't too bad to add this in.

The next challenge was to decide on a curvature for it all. I cut out just the top panel and started to play with my options trying to match something reasonably well. I wasn't entirely sure how best to do this so decided to make the trim that goes at the top to get a better feel for it. I've just taped it for now while I still play with curvatures but they weren't too bad in the end to build up.

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The next stage was to try and a) work out what the designs on the legs were and b) decide how to transfer this to the panels. Well, I had these card templates already made so I made use of them once again and started to trace the designs.

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I was all set to head into this when it occurred to me that maybe I should try out my planned method on the parts I had already before putting time and effort into something that may not have been any use.

So... back to the thighs and shins we go. A whole load of dremelling later and I had some lessons and discoveries and some rather nice detail sections.

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A touch of hand sanding later to tidy them all up and I glued them on to their respective sections.

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At this point I went through a load of tweaking with the leg panel curvatures, trying to get them matching and working out symmetry before i actually cut anything for the detail. In the end I decided that I really just needed to make a start on the strapping and then I would actually be able to decide.

So one set of straps and a lot of temporary tape to make sure it looked OK before gluing, we have

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Side panel detail is now finally next in the line up.
 
Legs look great so far. Funny that you did the legs and chainmail first, as those are the last parts I need to do for mine! Not looking forward to the chainmail, as Artorias has almost a full skirt of it. Any tips for doing it quickly?

Looking forward to how the upper body comes out, Ornstein cosplays always seem to be hit or miss, but this one looks awesome so far.
 
Sold me on the recent update. Praise the sun.

Thanks very much. Things should continue to shape up more interestingly from here I think. \o/

Legs look great so far. Funny that you did the legs and chainmail first, as those are the last parts I need to do for mine! Not looking forward to the chainmail, as Artorias has almost a full skirt of it. Any tips for doing it quickly?

Looking forward to how the upper body comes out, Ornstein cosplays always seem to be hit or miss, but this one looks awesome so far.

Decided to start at that end as I thought it meant I have more non-vital sections to allow me to get my eye in first before tackling the chest and the head for example.

With the chainmail. I just ended up making a whole heap of rings to start with and just worked at it whenever I had a chance really. I built it up in segments about 10 across by 4 or 5 down I think it was and then effectively zipped them together to build it all up. I tended to work along the rows and just see how it went.
Not sure if that makes sense or is of help but I can try and go into more detail if you would like. Hope that's something useful

Thanks very much. Hope that I can keep it to that standard. Things have been slower at the moment and I'm taking things a at bit more of a relaxed pace. Think that the September target is probably out of reach but I want to take my time and do this justice rather than rush it. I can always take it to MCM next year.

Plenty of sanding has been happening for the leg panels and I'll hopefully get something of an update up again before too long.
 
Ok. It's been a rather long time since my last update. This project is not dead though and I have been making a lot of progress still.

There's still plenty more to do as well. The biggest thing that I've achieved is to have essentially completed the chest piece. So, as it stands currently, this is what it looks like.

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I'm not entirely happy with the little curls in the last photo so I may well redo them.

Other things that have kept going:
All the detail sections for the leg panels are sanded and need glued.
I've remade the thighs as the original ones were too thick.
I've made a good start on the shoulders.
I've essentially made the bicep sections.
I've started to draw up plans for the forearms and the spear.

I've a lot more photos on facebook at the moment but when I can get organised enough I'll aim to get some more step by step photos up here.
 
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