Building a wand from Noita

I'm generally not someone who participates in Halloween in any meaningful way, but this year I decided I'd try my hand at putting together a costume that took more than a trip to Spirit Halloween or a single delivery from Amazon.

I'd been introduced to the game Noita by a friend somewhat recently. Without going into too much detail, you play as Minä, a non-descript wizard in a purple cloak, tasked with descending into a mysterious mountain to uncover its secrets. The entire world is composed of physically simulated pixels, like a falling sand simulation.

The game is awesome. It's also frustratingly difficult. I was particularly interested in the artstyle and the cryptic lore, so it pretty quickly became a cool idea to become Minä for Halloween. There's just one problem: cloak alone, Minä looks pretty similar to these guys:

Fortunately, there's an easy solution! We just need to accessorize.

That's easy, right?

Wands

In Noita, you'll find yourself stumbling across wands of varying appearance, stats, and spells. The essence of the game is putting together a creative synergy of discovered spells to aid you in descending deeper into the mountain.

In the picture above of Minä, you'll notice they are holding a blue wand. This is one of the starter wands, wands the game gives you when you start a new save.

The goal now was to build this starter wand in real life so I could haul it around and point it at people and confuse most people into thinking that it's a sword from Minecraft or something.

At this point I started looking into existing cosplay people had done for the game, and it turns out there's a pretty solid amount! There's some really great work out there that I was inspired by. In particular, I stumbled across a Reddit comment of someone mentioning they wanted to make one of the wands that could fit a Roman candle down the center.

That is just awesome. I loved that idea so much. I was going to make it work somehow.

Planning

My initial thought was to build the wand out of wood, and use something like a scroll saw to cut away at a traced version of the wand's pixel art. This actually probably would have worked fine, but I don't have a ton of experience with woodworking, and there was one potentially huge caveat: I don't really have a tool to drill a 17" hole down the center of the wand to put my Roman candle. Yes, it's that important to me!

I decided I'd instead try to do something I was a little more familiar with. Ironically, I've posted about it on this site before (and not much of anything else!). I wanted to give my old 3D printer a try. There were some potential problems to consider with this method, though:

• Problem: The size of my Ender 3 Pro's printbed is roughly 220mm x 220mm. Roman candles are 17" long (or at least the one I had in my car at the time of planning was).
  • Solution: We definitely cannot fit the entire length of the wand in a single printbed, so we'll need to split it up in some way.
• Problem: I really don't want to deal with supports or other 3D printing artifacts.
  • Solution: We can slice the wand lengthwise so that we can print two halves of it with the inner "drilled-out tube" for the Roman candle facing up. Don't worry, you'll see what I mean in picture soon.
• Problem: I've never painted on 3D printed PLA before, so I don't know how well it'll stick. The last time I painted was also like middle school or something. So I'm not sure I trust myself with crisp lines and fine details.
  • Solution: Hope.
• Problem: However I end up splitting up my model, I need to make sure I can plaster it together evenly and smoothly.
  • Solution: Be extra careful with tolerances.
• Problem: My 3D printer sucks.
  • Solution: Ignore for now!!!

Design

I have some experience in Blender, so I decided to go for that instead of trying to learn how to use some CAD software. I figured it would probably work better anyway since this project isn't really "functional" (like what you'd need CAD for), but rather mostly aesthetic with a few carefully measured parts.

The first thing I did was mock up the wand's physical design in Inkscape. You'll notice a small problem though!

There are some disconnected pixels on the left and right! They don't physically touch the rest of the wand body. No problem in funny 2D game, big problem in real life. When I print that, they'll be in separate pieces, so we need to fuse them somehow.

I tried a few things here, but what I ultimately ended up doing is growing the two disconnected pixels by 15% from their far corners, so that they'd overlap with the body of the wand and connect in a way that isn't too obvious to the naked eye:

This looks good! Now we have one connected unit that forms the entire wand.

From here, I imported that SVG into Blender.

I did this by File > Import > Scalable Vector Graphics. This creates a tiny mesh with some really horrible geometry that I had to manually clean up:

Now, it's not too difficult to triangulate that existing mesh and create a face out of it, then solidify it to the thickness of our wand.

Perfect! At this point, we can start thinking about scale. I know I want my wand to be roughly the length of a Roman candle (17"), and I want it to feel comfortable to hold. Blender makes units pretty easy to work with, so I scaled the model up until its lengthwise dimension was about 17".

Unlike woodworking, drilling a hole through the center of this wand is braindead easy in Blender! I used a Boolean modifier to cut away at the inside, leaving about an inch at the bottom of the wand for the Roman candle to sit against. I also made the hole around 0.1" larger in diameter than the Roman candle I had on hand so that it'd slide in and out neatly.

We still need to address the elephant in the room, though. This thing is far too big to print with my 3D printer, as we established above.

I decided I'd split the wand up into four pieces, and print them all separately. The first cut is obvious: slice it right down the middle so the effective length is 8.5" for each piece.

As I also mentioned before, I don't want to deal with 3D printing supports, so we can slice the hole itself right down the middle and have the top and bottom halves separate as well. Here's what that looks like:

Now, we need a good way to attach all four pieces together. I could just hope for the best and superglue all the flat faces together, but I had a feeling that was going to at best hold up for a few hours, and at worst just not work at all.

Instead, I chose to add alignment pegs to the model. Fortunately, I still have everything in Blender laying against each other, touching, and lined up perfectly, so all I had to do was add a bunch of pegs where they would end up going when the model was pushed together.

I did this by adding two cylinders for each peg: one that I'd Boolean difference from a piece, and one that I'd Boolean union from the opposing piece. I also worked some tolerances into these two pieces: the difference piece was about 0.2mm greater in diameter, and about 0.3mm taller. This allows the pegs to slide in and out of their holes without any resistance, and would also give me some headroom to add superglue once I get everything in place.

I'm not very fast or effective at Blender, so this part took me a decent amount of time, but this is what I ultimately came up with:

Looking good! I hope, at least...

Now we can just split these four pieces up into separate models so that we can print them separately! Here's what they look like, scattered across the Blender viewport. This should give you a better idea of what each piece looks like.

We'll be able to "plug" each of these pieces into each other, add some superglue to secure them, and then paint over that final model.

Printing

This part should be easy! I mean, why wouldn't it be easy!!! It's just clicking a couple buttons in a slicer and then letting it go!!!!!

It... printed into my bed?

In my Ender-3 Pro post I talked about setting the Z-offset carefully to prevent stuff like this from happening. I was pretty sure everything would work with this printer but it just decided to ruin my printbed even though I had the bed physically levelled and the Z-offset set.

You also might be able to tell I had to rotate the piece sideways to get it to fit nicely onto the printbed. Not a huge problem, but I did have to do it. It was still well within the confines of the E3 Pro's printbed.

I don't have pictures of this next issue, but the E3 pro would strangely "truncate" the shape of the piece as it reached the end of the bed. There was clearly another inch or so on each edge of the bed to work with, but the toolhead would reach some imaginary border and just stop moving, which ended up making the printed shape look something like this:

That's certainly not ideal.

I literally hate this printer. It's the worst. I've never done anything but struggle with it, and I'm very much lacking in motivation to solve whatever problem(s) plague it now.

Upgrading

A friend of mine recently invested in a Bambu Lab P1S and has said nothing but praise for it. It's a huge upgrade from my E3 Pro. I decided to give it a shot, and it shipped in a few days. It's a hell of a lot meatier than my old printer.

Unlike the E3 Pro, this thing literally just works out of the box. There's no assembly, you just take some foam out, cut a zip tie or two, plug it in, connect it to the internet, and voila. You're done. Modern technology is crazy.

Anyways... now that our enormous 3D printing upgrade is in place, we can get back to printing.

I dragged some of my exported STLs into Bambu Lab's slicer, Bambu Studio, and remotely started the print job over Wi-Fi. My E3 Pro can't even fathom that level of power.

Here are some print timelapses for your enjoyment:

They printed excellently, and they fit together just as I'd planned!

And of course, they held the Roman candle as per my original goals.

Awesome!

Next, I took everything apart again and added superglue to each of the peg holes. I reattached everything and laid something heavy over it so that it would bond nicely into a single piece.

Painting

This is the part I was most worried for.

After some extensive discussion with ChatGPT, I wrote up a shopping list and made a trip to Michael's, and bought a ton of paints and a primer to lay over the print. I really didn't want to have to mix paints because I wasn't sure how much I'd need, and I was afraid I'd be forced to replicate a special mixed color several times and have the tone be off, so I chose colors as close to the original wand as possible.

I started with a layer of gesso across the entire print to act as primer.

This stuck on shockingly well! It wasn't perfectly white yet, so I did another pass an hour or so later.

Now the black wand is white, and ready to paint over.

I didn't really have much methodology to painting. I just sorta did it. And it looked totally terrible in the first pass...

The paint did not dry fast, and would very regularly smear and reveal the underlying gesso every time I tried to redistribute globs of it. Almost certainly a skill issue. My solution? More paint.

I waited a while, then did another coat.

Starting to look better... definitely still looks like I did it in preschool, but it's looking a bit more believable now. Again, my solution here was to wait and then do more paint.

This was my final coat. I think it came out decent. The darker stripes on the handle are still rough, but that was the one color I had to mix, and I was having a really hard time evening out those edges. I convinced myself nobody would notice except me. :)

Pretty solid! Now, to put the rest of the outfit together...

Everything else

I bought some super cheap purple poly-satin cloak/cape things off of Amazon for $15 or so. I bought one in large, and one in medium. Neither of them "closed up" at the front, so I ended up velcroing the larger one shut, and using the smaller one over the top as Minä's cape.

I also accessorized with some belt-mounted potions:

Then, of course, Minä's face is not visible in-game, so I bought a black morph suit to wear underneath it all.

Final result

All said and done, here's the full composition!

The host of this party would not let me fire off the Roman candle, so I don't have a video of that yet unfortunately. Literally 1984.

I'm quite happy with how it came out! I learned a lot in the process of using Blender to model something I'd use functionally in the real world, and I got a new printer out of it. Yippee!

Extra bonus picture with some friends, crossing over 2D side scroller universes:

Final comments

Thanks for reading this awful stream-of-consciousness log of attempts at a Halloween costume! Don't hesitate to reach out for the model files or STL/3MF files if you want to make your own...