Ilija Roknich

About

Hey there! I'm Ilija (ee-lee-ya), online I go primarily by M16.
I'm a student in Animation & VFX at Purdue University. I focus on the "macro" and recreate digitally parts of the cosmos. For me, space is more than a setting; it is the ultimate lens for the human condition. The Apollo missions transformed how people thought about each other and the world, and I attempt to do the same via the use of 3D/VFX: to create pieces of art that invite people to explore the themes and experiences of what makes us human.Outside my digital work, I also work on other projects across a variety of mediums. Regardless of project or medium, I tend to view my projects as an expression of myself and as an opportunity for other people to become inspired with their own creative ideas.Hope you like my site! You can get in touch with me using the buttons below, and you can view a curated selection of my work using the buttons above. Thanks for stopping by!

Work

• 3D Art
• Cosplay
• Photography
• Other

unlisted

You're not supposed to be here... how are you?

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photography

• nature
• Drone
• Space

While working on completing the Eagle rank in Boy Scouts as a kid, I decided to take the photography merit badge. Working on that introduced me to the basics of photography and inspired me to continue to do more with it. Photography is a way for me to capture my wonder of the world and things around me. I've tried out three main kinds, each being progressively larger in scale. You can take a look at each using the buttons above.

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nature

Nature has always been a major inspiration of mine. It's been the thing I take the most photos of consistently, whether on trips or just out and about. The extraordinary can be found in the ordinary, and nature gives great opportunities to demonstrate this.

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Drone

During high school, I tried out drone photography/videography. In fact, I even briefly considered a career in the field. While this was my shortest lived photography project, it's one I look back on fondly. It gave me my first real-world take at an "overview" effect, and inspired me to further explore the world in a larger scale.

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Astrophotography

My most recent project in photography has been astrophotography. I've always been a major space and science fiction fan, so this has been especially fun! Recently, I've built my own 3D printed telescope, and have been using it to look at the planets and such. I'll use my phone to take any other long exposure photos of just the general night sky. Astrophotography offers the most "macro" view of the world (and beyond) that anyone can get, and I just get so blown away by every photo of it I've seen.

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cosplay

Most recently, many of my personal projects have been costume-making. Cosplay and the creative process behind it is a way for me to "complete" my connection to a piece of media; it’s a kind of tribute to the worlds and characters that inspire me. Below are the main costumes I've made over the years.

• Isaac Clarke
• The Prisoner
• Marshal Lee
• Pirate
• Cayde-6
• Toxin

Toxin (2019)

This was my first ever cosplay! I was in a Spider-Man phase at the time, and it happened to be that my local library was having a costume contest. So, after roping my mom into helping, we made my first costume of the symbiote Toxin. I also happened to somehow win the contest, which certainly helped to inspire me to do more in the future!

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Cayde-6 (2023)

This was my second cosplay, and it was made for my first convention. I was a big Destiny 2 gamer at the time, and had recently started getting familiar with 3D printing. So, putting the two together, it only seemed natural that I went as Cayde-6. I was quite happy with how it turned out, especially for my first time doing this sort of thing. I really enjoyed this project, and I learned a lot of fundamental cosplay techniques and tips during it.

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Pirate (2024)

I made two costumes in 2024, with the first one being for my first Renaissance Faire! I was going during "pirate weekend", so I played along and went as an orange-accent-themed pirate. This costume was significantly less DIY than others, but I still had fun putting it all together. I really wanted to make a little boat looking shell for my Onewheel electric skateboard, but about halfway through making it I decided it would be just too impractical given the location.

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Marshal Lee (2024)

This one was done for my second time going to the Fan Expo Chicago convention. Given this was my second costume of the year, I wanted it to be cheap and easy. Thankfully, Marshal's design was really simple, and I had everything on hand besides his signature axe guitar and vampire teeth. I was going through a bit of an Adventure Time phase at the time, so it only made sense I go as a character from the show. Marshal Lee is a gender bent version of Marceline the Vampire Queen. He only appeared in a handful of episodes in the original series, but even still I had a surprising amount of people recognize me!

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The prisoner (2025)

A quick heads-up: this cosplay gives away some things about the game Outer Wilds. If you want to play the game's DLC for yourself, I suggest you don't read this section!

Late into 2024, I played Outer Wilds: a video game that I truly felt changed my philosophy on life and death in a meaningful way. After finishing it, I knew I had to pay tribute to it and make a cosplay of one of its characters. The Prisoner was a character from Outer Wilds' DLC, and in short, Outer Wilds' story would not have happened without their sacrifice.This was by far my most involved cosplay project to date. I used a lot of new materials and techniques, which you'll see below. This is also my first proper costume build log, so hopefully it's formatted well!

Starting off, I did some planning. My first job was to get the sizing/scaling right for real life and my own body's proportions. Looking back, this is the part of the project I really wish I had spent more time on, due to some problems I'll outline later. I ripped The Prisoner's model from the game using AssetStudioGUI, imported it into Blender, fixed up the model a bit, split it up into separate pieces, and organized stuff. I'm not going to go into all the stuff I did digitally, as it's the parts that I found most tedious and had the most trouble staying focused on.

This was my first time using metal in a cosplay, so I had to learn a lot before I could even get started. I followed Willow Creative's stilts build log and ordered almost everything for them off Amazon. Instead of drilling/tapping screw holes, I went with using T-nuts already provided with the metal extrusions (though I swapped them out for better ones later). I got the handful of required holes drilled at my local hardware store. I then did a quick first assembly and test wear using some rope.

The base clothes I got from a local thrift store. I eventually switched out the shirt for something a bit closer in color as I did not want to screw around with fabric dyeing. The pants were a crazy good find. I only had to stretch the bottom cuffs a bit, they worked perfectly as is otherwise.

For the staff/vision torch, I decided to 3D print every piece except a wooden rod through the center for strength. I ended up having to model about a third of the entire staff in Blender, as the in game model was too broken for 3D printing. The black metal pieces are, thankfully, not reflective, so I was able to get away with a more simple finishing process. That consisted of a heavy first coat of Rustoleum 2-in-1 sandable filler primer, some sanding with a heavy grit (60 ish) sandpaper, a lighter coat of the same primer, a quick pass with some medium grit (100 ish) sandpaper, and then one coat of Behr oil rubbed bronze. I did also add a matte clear coat on top for protection. I just used raw marble filament for the whitish looking inner part.

For the wooden parts of the staff, I wanted to try my hand at 3D printing wood, or rather a wood lookalike. I experimented a little bit with some settings and values, but I pretty much copied everything outlined in this Reddit post. I ended up using a color varying brown and tan filament, and went over it with some dark oak wood stain after some light sanding. I was quite happy with the end result and did the same process for the rest of the wooden pieces of the staff later on.

The cloak/poncho and skirt looking pieces were one of the things I was nervous about with this project. I hadn't done much work with fabric before, especially to this level of detail. I used a broken umbrella from my work for the fabric as it was free, and I didn't know how much I was going to need. Next, I measured the in-game model and myself to calculate a rough ratio of pixels to inches, which I then used to create a design using The Prisoner's UV's for my Silhouette cutting machine to cut from multiple sheets of card stock paper. If all that sounded ridiculous, that's because it was. I mostly just remember being bombarded with numbers that day lol. Anyway, I used the stencil to trace out where I would cut out of the umbrella fabric. For the skirt, I just eyeballed it all. It honestly came out just as well as my overcomplicated way. During all that, I also got a T-shirt from a craft store that I would later use for the lighter green upper torso thing.

Due to me choosing to use umbrella fabric for the cloak and skirt, I had to color it somehow. A perhaps easier solution would have been to dye it, but I really did not want to dye stuff at all for this project. As such, I opted for absolutely drenching them in spray paint! I do not recommend using this method, while it did "work," it was expensive and the result didn't really justify the work. The color wasn't even more accurate than any fabric I saw in stores, and I tried a good few different spray paints. It did change the umbrella fabric to practically a completely different material that had a nice matte texture, though.

Since I had to wait a while for the cloak and skirt to dry, I did some miscellaneous work on the head and stilts. I was pretty stumped originally on what to use for the head's feathers, as The Prisoner's "feathers" look more like reptile scales than anything else, yet still had a feathery look. I ended up choosing to go with felt, as it had a furry/feathery texture to them while still being able to be easily shaped into a scale shape. Felt also was thicker than something like paper, so I figured it would add a bit of a three-dimensional effect. I did some work on the 3D printed parts of the stilts too. I was able to model and print the hooves from The Prisoner's model to slip on the stilts. The feet plates for the stilts were also printed around this time, though I did go through a few different revisions before settling on ones with some metal reinforcements towards the back. For the frame of the head, I ended up scrapping my original plan of 3D printing it and used a tomato cage instead. It was pretty fun to bend it into shape, though I do wish I had gone with my original plan for sizing issues I'll go into later.

Now that the cloak and skirt had dried enough, I decided to fold over into the inside a little bit of the edge to give it a much cleaner look, which turned out perfect. I also primed, sanded, and painted the hooves. For the next part of the cloak and skirt, I decided to freehand a cutout for the tan sections and then make a stencil I'd use to spray paint. The actual spray painting did not turn out very well, there was a lot of overspray and imperfections. Later on it fixed itself once I added more detail, but I did not like it at the time.

At this point in the project, I was quickly running out of time. As such, I jumped around a lot. I tried to work on a different component up until I needed to wait for it's paint to dry or for glue to dry etc., then I'd go onto the next part. Speaking of which, for glue I used JB Plastic Weld; it stinks horribly, but it genuinely works wonders. I also used Loctite thread sealant on the screws in the stilts, which held up surprisingly well too. I ended up buying some generic monster finger extenders off Amazon and got my mom to paint them later on, as I didn't have enough time to 3D print them as I had planned.

Around now is that point in this project where I had done pretty much everything. My mom was finishing the hands, I added some detail to the crop top lighter green middle layer, and I cut out and painted the cloak and skirt dangly bits. I was pretty much done, except for arguably the most important part: the head. The head was what I was most nervous about working on overall, and was ironically the part I waited the latest to work on. I used a morphsuit mask stretched over top for the basic shape, and used tinfoil to make the shape of the face. Attaching the antlers was a big problem, as the ones I had printed had nothing I could use to attach them to. My solution was to add a separate metal rod to the inside, bend it into place, melt into the bottom of the antlers a channel where the rod could slide into, and drench it all in hot glue. Surprisingly, that all did work eventually. After that fiasco, I started cutting out the felt feather scales. Nothing fancy here, I just cut each one out individually and hot glued it on. The bottom third of the head didn't have anything there and the morphsuit mask couldn't stretch farther, so I just glued the feathers to each other and had them kind of floating in place. I was a little concerned as to the integrity of them, but it ended up I wouldn't even use them....

The final hurdle I would face was that my head I had stressed so hard about, that I had waited so long to start, was comically tall. I was devastated. My workaround was to cut off the aforementioned bottom third and try and squeeze it onto my head. That didn't work well though, as it was so tight in the inside it left a mark on my forehead after only wearing it for a few minutes. I ended up trying to fake the height issue by adding foam padding to the crop top layer and stretching its neck over the metal bits of the head. While not ideal, it actually wound up helping to minimize some of the scaling issues I expected I'd run into with the legs and arms. The cloak also covered the area where the foam ended, so it didn't even look all that strange.

At this point, I was pretty much done. My time had run out, I was tired, and felt like the cosplay was done "enough" for me to be happy with it. I did another test fit of everything besides the stilts and head, and it really made all the work put into this project worth it. For the staff, I ended up unfortunately not being able to use it as it was 20+ pounds. I simply couldn't use something that heavy as my walking aid without it becoming a walking hindrance.

Anyway, here's the finished product at the convention! I was only able to wear it for about a half hour due to how much effort it was to walk, coupled with the overheating and hyperventilating that came with it. I had a good handful of people come up to me and take pictures or chat a bit, which made it all worth it. My two friends also worked on their own cosplays (with some of my help lol) during all of this, so we went together as the three main Outer Wilds species!
Outer Wilds is a game that means so much to me, and I'm so happy I was able to pay it tribute with the two friends who I got to play it first. There were certainly some problems, some things that didn't work, and many things I've learned from this project, but it was the most fun and most fulfilling cosplay I've made thus far.

Thanks for reading all this if you did! I spent a lot of time making this build log, hopefully you found it informative, helpful, or at least interesting! If you want to see even more, I had a build log thread in the Unofficial Outer Wilds Discord Server. You can check it out by joining the server through the link above, then by clicking this link here or finding "EOTE cosplay build log (dlc spoilers)" under the #fan-art channel. Thanks to everyone who supported me throughout this project, including my parents, friends, and internet strangers. Appreciate you all!

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Isaac Clarke (2026)

This cosplay has been in the works since June 2025! After playing Dead Space (2023), I was inspired then to make a cosplay of the main character: Isaac Clarke. He has many different suits throughout the game, but the most iconic by far (and my favorite) is his level 3 suit. Life started back up after the summer, though, and I kind of forgot about this project entirely. In April 2026, however, a friend of mine begun playing the Dead Space remake, which inspired me again to want to make this cosplay, and led me to find my old June 2025 folder dedicated to the project at the time! So I essentially decided twice to want to work on this project lol

The first step as always was to do research and initial testing. For this project, I decided to make the switch to PETG 3D printer filament, as it's stronger, more heat-resistant, and (most importantly) easier to sand. This first few test prints for sizing were done using normal cheap PLA. This was the first time I used the website Refmaker for helmet sizing, and it's really a wonderful tool! Most of the models used for this project I got off Cults3D, and in hindsight I'm happy I did go this route instead of modifying the game's models directly. After my Prisoner Cosplay, I realized how much more I like the physical side of costume making compared to the digital, and coughing up an extra $50 or $60 on this project to be able to do that made it so much more enjoyable.

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3D Art

Here's my future career! I mainly do digital 3D art using programs like Blender. Below are some of my best pieces thus far. Click on any image to see some comments and behind the scenes I've included for that project.

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Other Art

Throughout my life so far I've done artworks in various other mediums: most notably painting, paper crafts, and 3D printing. Below, I've categorized similar works into their own sections, and I've provided more info on certain ones once you click on an image.

_Paper

_{2024 Architecture Competition}

_Painting

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