Foam Air Assault and Sword Builds for Me and My Girlfriend (Comic-Con 2012/2013)

[Spacemeat]

hahaha I doubt it, there are a lot of lurkers / lazy posters who check this out I'm sure of it. And thats a good idea, can't wait to see pics!

Knowing that at least one person is interested in this build is somewhat gratifying.

So, I bought some transparent spray paint for polycarbonate:

I masked off the outsides of the blades and painted the insides.

So, I finally have blue shiny blades!

I shoved a few lights in a blade (not final!) just to see what it would look like, and as you can see, I've got some light diffusion issues. I'm going to give it s spray of a "frosted glass" spray that I found the other day, should help diffuse things a bit more while retaining the shiny blue look on the outside.

On the foam front, I decided to make some replacement shoulder pieces for myself. The first one I did was oversized, so I had to redo it again with this more reasonable sized piece. The grooves I burn in the back coupled with the heat gun really help make nice curves:

14 days till comic-con! Definitely entering panic mode as we get closer and I still have so much to do! I swear we're going to be hot glued into the suits like last year. Funny thing is, I didn't intend to have this much work. Orginally I was going to replace my chestplate and helmet and build one suit for my girlfriend. Now, the only pieces of my original suit left are just the shoulders (not even the add-on plates!) and the shins. Plus, the whole "build a vacuform machine and make some swords" thing has been very very time consuming. Wish me luck in getting these suits done in time, I'm pretty much going to be burning the midnight oil everynight for the next 14 days.

 

[Spacemeat]

hey everybody!

Time for a quick update. So, I tried out the frosted glass spray on the inside of the blades. It pretty much turned the insides white, but the exterior is still a very deep blue. It's certianly helped with the light diffusion and I've arranged the LEDs so they are parallel with the edges of the blades.

This is kinda just a proof of concept shot, I'll be spreading the LEDs out better in the final product. It's hard to tell with the camera, but the light disperses much better in front of the human eye

In foam news, the tactical case seems to have duplicated

And I got all the shoulder plates done! yay!

I also realized it's really hard to put on the shoulders once the chest plate is on and the shoulders are clipped in. So, I've made the area on the inside of the arm move like a hinge and hooked up magnets to it so it's easier to get on and off:

 

[Annanymous]

AHH dude this is awesome. I'm so excited to see it all put together! I love the magnet idea with the shoulders!!

 

[RoxyRoo]

I'm loving the shoulders, man. The eva seems to behave so well for you. haha. Keep going! Only a few weeks left!

 

[Spacemeat]

AHH dude this is awesome. I'm so excited to see it all put together! I love the magnet idea with the shoulders!!

I'm loving the shoulders, man. The eva seems to behave so well for you. haha. Keep going! Only a few weeks left!

Thanks guys. I've got so many rare earth magnets around (I might have cleaned out a local Harbor Freight or two ), that I'm finding all sorts of random places to put them.

Such as my new phone holders:

I not going to trust a $200 smartphone to just magnets so I'll be putting in a velcro attachment at the back and front of the holder.
And just in case anyone is wonder how I've been making those little holes to put the magnets in, I've simply been buring holes with a hot sodering iron. Just need to get the depth just right and the magnet can sit flush with the foam or be slight indented

I also did some forearm detailing, yay!

I think i've finally finished all foam work with the hand and knee plates:

And finally had time to lay out all the armor:

And i moved everything down to my garage and have been pretty much living down there when not at work

I've filled the gaps with spackle. And I've realized that the only good spackle is the home depot "patch n' paint". I'm not sure if that's a home depot brand, but I can't seem to find it anywhere else.

And I'm finally at the point that I can apply my plastidip. As a refresher from the last time I did this, I just brush on the plastidip after I've diluted with "Industrial Machine Lubricant", I use it because it's a replacement for xylene

still got a few major pieces to plastidip

My girlfriend has started painting her helmet, she's trying to approximate the colors of a halo 3 zombie, and I don't think it's half bad:

On the sword front, I've created a transparent "skeleton" to connect the blades to the handle, and will serve a the platform that I glue the lights to

I've got 3 three days from this point to the con, and I'm cutting it extremely close as usual. Thankfully my helpful cousin has been helping me rig up the fans and lights with his totally awesome sodering skills and I'm getting some additional assitance from my girlfriend, sister, and friends. Hopefuly this will all get done in time. I probably won't be updating until during or after Comic-Con. So, hopefully the next post you guys will be seeing are a pair of completed Spartan-IIIs

 

[captaincaliflour]

Lookin good! very jealous

 

[hyundai2806]

great foam builds!!! kinda wish i had started with that instead of pepping..
but im movin as slow as it is, stilll movin along

looking great tho cant wait to see the final outcome!! excited much

 

[Annanymous]

OMG you are so close to being done! I am real excited for you guys

 

[harican89]

hey. really cool build. is it possible that you can upload the files you used?
iam very interessted in the abs file:

but i want the boots, cod and knee files too iam pretty sure you invest a lot of time into the foam templates.

best greetings

 

[Spacemeat]

Hey everybody!

Some I'm back from comic-con and finally had a little time to unpack. It was totally a blast, and probably one of the most fun comic-cons I've been to in a while. Unfortunately, my armor was never really complete and I worked everynight during the con in my hotel room to try to finish up and I happened to missed both 405th photoshoots . I did piece it all together enough to show up for the Halo 4 panel (though we were so late, we had to bum rush the stage while everyone else got to come in from the back )

You can see us pushing through the crowd around 40:42, lol

The armor has a few design flaws, and I've learned quite a few things. I'll probably go into detail with them once I get it all out of the box and do a detailed post mortem on them. At this point, I guess I'll be focusing on readying the armor properly for comic-con 2013, and as a shorter term goal, Long beach comic-con and the Halo 4 launch.

I'm thinking I need to redo the strapping and undersuit that I improvised in my hotel room, I also want to put in the lights in the suit, because I had to abandon that last minute, and finally I'll probably be making another set of swords, because this first set was a great learning experience, but I think I can make the next set that much better.

So, in the final days I had to pretty much call in the calvary, and I had some friends and family helping out nearly full time to get it all done:

Totally would not have gotten it done without thier help

My cousin cam up with an interesting idea for light diffusion. He stuffed each LED in the sword inside a glue stick:

You can see a comparison of with and without the gluesticks, and I think it works pretty well, but I'm going to look into alternate ways of diffusing the light that isn't so wasteful with the glue sticks

So I pieced and painted it all together and roamed the halls for a bit with my sister:

And had our picture posted up on the Halo Waypoint twitter (yay!)
http://twitter.com/HaloWaypoint/status/223922292219064320/photo/1

played a little halo 4:

and i just couldn't resist this photobomb:

he really had no idea i was there until other people started laughing

My girlfriend's armor turned out similarly too, but she only wore it to the panel and we didn't exactly get pictures of it. I did find this one on a website:

I don't consider this done yet, so there'll be more come and I promised my girlfriend we'll do a nice photoshoot of just ourselves so she can look sufficiently badass

 

[Spacemeat]

Slight update, I found another picture of my girlfriend!

YAY!

https://halo.xbox.com/blogs/Headlines/post/2012/07/19/The-Halo-Bulletin-71812.aspx

 

[drack]

I love it man. Amazing work! Looking forward to seeing this all done.

Keep up the good work,
Tom.

 

[Fxd2fght]

Amazing stuff work.

Love the matching colour schemes.

 

[Fxd2fght]

Genius! Love how you did the canal to create bends in the pieces.

Great pics.

 

[Spacemeat]

Thanks guys, and if anyone happens to spot more pictures of us from the con, it would be cool if you could direct me to them. My girlfriend barely spent any time in her armor and we were kinda incapacitated in terms of taking pictures.

 

[DagothDraal]

Beautiful, simply beautiful! I love your visors the most!

 

[Mstruvmgc]

I am sad that i missed this entire build. You did a fantastic job

 

[antoanto24]

beautiful.. i love it

 

[BeanwaterFox]

You have no idea how many ideas I'm taking from you! This build is AMAZING!!! I saw the swords and I did this thing:

The magnet-connection idea is one I never would have though of, but I recently bought a bunch of magnets and now I think I know exactly how to put them to use.
Additionally, I decided to make the torso out of foam. I've never worked with foam before, but now that I see how successful the canal-folding idea is, I'm pretty sure I'm going to employ it in my own build.

 

[Spacemeat]

Sorry, I haven't gotten around to disecting the armor after comic-con, but I figured I should tell right away. The magnets are NOT a good solution for keeping the armor on. The armor snaps together well with magnets, but any significant force or weight (such as when you sit down, or move a lot) will pull the magnets apart. I spent a great deal of time during the convention looking down to see if anything had popped lose and if I had to push them back together. A solution I finally hit upon was to use the magnets in addition to a center release buckle. The magnets pretty much help align the foam pieces and allows you to quickly put it on, and the buckle does the actual hard work of keeping the piece together