This is all your fault, Shrubsy.
Shrubsy, of course, is Bart van der Westerlaken who did a fantastic model with Warframe‘s Lex Prime pistol, which I printed off (two of them actually) and brought to TennoCon 2018 with me … with my personally-designed holster made specifically for them. They were a huge hit by the Digital Extremes team and fellow Warframe fans alike. Bart and I kept sending tweets to each other throughout the day, and I’m glad to say that we’ve maintained contact since then. The whole experience prompted me to make something on my own. This, of course, led me to make a Vaykor Hek – a massive quad-barrel shotgun – as I previously posted.
Actually, I decided on the Vaykor Hek because of DE’s Community Manager Megan Everett. She not-so-subtly asked me what I was bringing for TennoCon 2019, as though she was giving me a real choice. As it turns out, she loves the Vaykor Hek, so when I posited that as one of the options…
So the Vaykor Hek is totally her fault — and I’m grateful for that. After posting images of the Vaykor Hek to my Instagram account, Bart responded that if I’m going to bring a pistol (another Lex Prime in this case) and the Vaykor Hek, I might as well bring a melee weapon as well. This is actually how the game is played. You can go on any mission with your choice of one primary, one secondary, and one melee weapon. I figured “Nah, I don’t have time to make a melee weapon” so I dismissed the idea.
Less than an hour later, I was looking through Warframe‘s melee weapons. Because of course.
I finally tried the Grineer sheev simply because I thought that it was simple enough to make it easy to do but with just enough detail to make it a challenge. And this is the result.
Yes, this is a prototype. There are still several issues that I need to fix (that fortunately are too small to see or otherwise strategically hidden in these photos). I don’t have time to make the blade edge glow blue like in the game, so I tinted it with some metallic blue instead. If I revisit this with a v2.0 I’ll modify the blade edge to glow.
I’m currently working on lighting up the area in the middle of the blade and the plasma edge at the very end. Thankfully, Adafruit has some items that should help with that. I’ll of course get photos posted of the final version – if I can get the lights to work, that is.