LordSquishers
New Member
Hello! I’m Patrick, a long-time Halo fan and a newly minted engineer (graduated this past year!).
Since I was about 11 I desperately wanted Halo in real life, and the closest outlet for me was making my own set of armor. I had started with foam well over a decade ago, and now I have the luxury of affordable and reliable 3D printers (love them!) which I used almost daily in my work. With a handful of complete projects under my belt (a human arbiter helmet, a small-scale Scout helmet, and a timeless moss painted Sidekick), I finally feel comfortable with most aspects of creating props. 405th has been an invaluable resource for me over the last twelve years and I wanted to post this project as appreciation for all that this community has given me in terms of knowledge and inspiration <3.
My armor of choice has always been the Mark Vb suit since I first started playing Reach in 2010. My friend and I have been a formidable ranked/BTB duo since Infinite’s release and our spartans have become iconic for us (see pic below). For years, my grenadier helmet has been an idea and I’ve had some printed parts lying around for it for about a year now. In September, my friend jokingly suggested it’d be neat to wear our helmets on halloween, and that’s when the wheels started turning.
For my helmet (grenadier with the UA/Type E3 attachment) I got the files from Aguilar Workshop (link). Normally I don’t pay for model files since I have the capacity to make them myself from the game files, but in this case it saves me time that I’d much rather be spending working on the rest of the helmet. They also include well thought out slices and attachment points which helps with painting so so much. Well worth the $20! He has lots of other Halo files available too.
My friend’s helmet (HAZOP) model is from Moe Sizzlac (link) and includes the helmet shell plus the visor buck. We had to manually cut this one and ended up with ten different pieces all with dovetail cuts. In the future I might choose a different connector method but dovetails were easily accessible in Bambu Studio. We were also in a little bit of a rush so I went with something I knew I could get decent results with.
We printed on a Bambu P1S, with each helmet taking around 1.3kg of filament and about 36-48 hours if you include the visor bucks.
I’ve been working a lot on this stage of the build process and gathering a lot of advice from other posts here – my main takeaway was lots and lots of rounds of sanding with increasing grit and more paint. This time, I finally introduced bondo into the workflow with really helped with the seams and top/flat surfaces, where layer lines were obvious and paint couldn’t fill alone. I learned here that it’s worth making sure there’s a clean transition between the bondo and the print (since I’m not covering the whole print in bondo) because even with paint you can tell if there's a raised section of filler.
For sanding I went with what I had on me, so the sanding order was 80/120/120/220, with triple thick glaze in between. After the 220 grit I applied the base coat which was part specific (whatever the majority color of the piece was). With additional coats of spray paint you either have to apply them within an hour or after 48 hours, which was a particular problem for the masking step. It’s difficult to mask a part after only an hour of drying, and gloss spray paint really crackles if the base isn’t fully cured. This ended up being the largest time sink for the project and I had to eventually schedule my paint times to optimize the total time. Gotta love watching paint dry!
Unfortunately I forgot to add a pre-base base coat of metallic paint for masking when weathering. I had decided for this helmet to go with a factory-new look, but when painting my full armor (more at the end) I’m 100% going to weather it and I’m going to run into an issue with this helmet. I haven’t sealed this helmet with a satin finish yet either so I do have some wiggle room in that regard. On a side note (and to my benefit), the flat white spray paint I used isn’t as protective as the glossy coats and tends to come off pretty easily on rough contact. At first this bothered me, but it works in my favor because as I wear it it naturally weathers. Already there is some nice texture on the helmet top and edges.
I had the thought “window tint does exactly what I want!” and wondered why no one had really discussed it at length on the forum as a decent option (specifically with formed plastic). Since the tint was relatively cheap for a full sheet, I grabbed some from Amazon and decided to go for it. During this tint escapade I was also learning how to vacuum form for the first time. I tried to change one variable at a time, so I tried tintless first and then added tint. I learned two things in the first run: a heat gun wouldn’t cut it, and that I had PET, not PET-G. So I replaced the heat gun with a 1500W space heater and visited every engineer’s friend: McMaster-Carr.
I then added the tint and for the life of me could not prevent bubbles from forming while deforming the plastic enough to get a decent shape. I even tried slowly ramping up the temp and drying out the plastic. Besides the bubbles, I noticed that the excessive heat caused the tint to adhere to the plastic’s surface – and as it deformed the tint bunched up. This created a surprisingly neat stress field visualization though! I can definitely say that window tint is a not a worthwhile route for vacuum forming (per my experience! Maybe someone else can get it to work).
Decided to go the more conventional route and use iDylePoly – but went with darker colors to get more of a reflective look. My goal was a brown/bronze tint anyways, and when I tested the brown dye it worked great for what I was going for. While researching ways to get more reflectivity, I found marinesniper’s forum post using graphite powder. My thinking was it couldn’t hurt and I could always take it off… I think it helped? It definitely darkened the visor, but any more than one full coat and visibility started to dip. It definitely added an extra layer to the visor so I’d recommend if you’re looking for something a little extra.
In the end got successful pulls on the HAZOP buck since it was much smaller, and got decent pulls on the grenadier visor (never got full suction but got the right shape). I could’ve fixed this with a larger table and plastic stock, but I didn’t feel like it was worth the effort for this specific project.
This is where the helmets diverged – I continued work on my helmet while the HAZOP helmet was shelved for the time being. Location and scheduling became a bit of a problem for my friend and I (as well as a sick nightwing costume we were working on) so the HAZOP helmet will be leaving us here
.
I’m planning to add a 40x10mm fan to the top of the helmet in the UA vent before I wear the helmet for any longer than a few minutes. Ventilation is key to comfort. These fans are 5 volts so I will need to either modify the existing wiring or add another circuit – either way, I will be spending more than 10 minutes on the next design . The current wiring uses a lot of electrical tape and looks extremely disorganized because of how fast I got it in the helmet. I swear it won’t be like this forever!
The final cost for the helmet totals at around $250 if you include all the R&D and parts that weren’t used in the final product. If I was going to make multiple of these helmets, it would only set me back about $100 per, with the cost mainly going to paint and filament. This helmet took about a week of hands-on work and a week of printing time (if I had done it all in one go!). Not bad! And more importantly very repeatable.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this post – this helmet has been a goal of mine for the longest time, and I’m so happy I was not only able to finish it but additionally document it for the community. Besides starting my career, my eyes are set next on completing a full suit for HaloFest in December of 2026. Modelling has already begun! I tried to be pretty thorough with my process for this helmet but if you have any questions please ask! It’s always rewarding to work with others on something as great as this.
Since I was about 11 I desperately wanted Halo in real life, and the closest outlet for me was making my own set of armor. I had started with foam well over a decade ago, and now I have the luxury of affordable and reliable 3D printers (love them!) which I used almost daily in my work. With a handful of complete projects under my belt (a human arbiter helmet, a small-scale Scout helmet, and a timeless moss painted Sidekick), I finally feel comfortable with most aspects of creating props. 405th has been an invaluable resource for me over the last twelve years and I wanted to post this project as appreciation for all that this community has given me in terms of knowledge and inspiration <3.
My armor of choice has always been the Mark Vb suit since I first started playing Reach in 2010. My friend and I have been a formidable ranked/BTB duo since Infinite’s release and our spartans have become iconic for us (see pic below). For years, my grenadier helmet has been an idea and I’ve had some printed parts lying around for it for about a year now. In September, my friend jokingly suggested it’d be neat to wear our helmets on halloween, and that’s when the wheels started turning.
Printing
For my helmet (grenadier with the UA/Type E3 attachment) I got the files from Aguilar Workshop (link). Normally I don’t pay for model files since I have the capacity to make them myself from the game files, but in this case it saves me time that I’d much rather be spending working on the rest of the helmet. They also include well thought out slices and attachment points which helps with painting so so much. Well worth the $20! He has lots of other Halo files available too.
My friend’s helmet (HAZOP) model is from Moe Sizzlac (link) and includes the helmet shell plus the visor buck. We had to manually cut this one and ended up with ten different pieces all with dovetail cuts. In the future I might choose a different connector method but dovetails were easily accessible in Bambu Studio. We were also in a little bit of a rush so I went with something I knew I could get decent results with.
We printed on a Bambu P1S, with each helmet taking around 1.3kg of filament and about 36-48 hours if you include the visor bucks.
Sanding, Filling, and Painting
I’ve been working a lot on this stage of the build process and gathering a lot of advice from other posts here – my main takeaway was lots and lots of rounds of sanding with increasing grit and more paint. This time, I finally introduced bondo into the workflow with really helped with the seams and top/flat surfaces, where layer lines were obvious and paint couldn’t fill alone. I learned here that it’s worth making sure there’s a clean transition between the bondo and the print (since I’m not covering the whole print in bondo) because even with paint you can tell if there's a raised section of filler.
For sanding I went with what I had on me, so the sanding order was 80/120/120/220, with triple thick glaze in between. After the 220 grit I applied the base coat which was part specific (whatever the majority color of the piece was). With additional coats of spray paint you either have to apply them within an hour or after 48 hours, which was a particular problem for the masking step. It’s difficult to mask a part after only an hour of drying, and gloss spray paint really crackles if the base isn’t fully cured. This ended up being the largest time sink for the project and I had to eventually schedule my paint times to optimize the total time. Gotta love watching paint dry!
Unfortunately I forgot to add a pre-base base coat of metallic paint for masking when weathering. I had decided for this helmet to go with a factory-new look, but when painting my full armor (more at the end) I’m 100% going to weather it and I’m going to run into an issue with this helmet. I haven’t sealed this helmet with a satin finish yet either so I do have some wiggle room in that regard. On a side note (and to my benefit), the flat white spray paint I used isn’t as protective as the glossy coats and tends to come off pretty easily on rough contact. At first this bothered me, but it works in my favor because as I wear it it naturally weathers. Already there is some nice texture on the helmet top and edges.
The Visors
The visors were by far the most R&D intensive aspect of this project. There are many great tutorials out there, but most (and rightfully so!) go with a chrome airbrushed interior to get the reflective look. My issue with this approach is visibility – I really wanted to have a clean view out the visor while still having a one-way effect (hydrochroming is sadly out of the question here).I had the thought “window tint does exactly what I want!” and wondered why no one had really discussed it at length on the forum as a decent option (specifically with formed plastic). Since the tint was relatively cheap for a full sheet, I grabbed some from Amazon and decided to go for it. During this tint escapade I was also learning how to vacuum form for the first time. I tried to change one variable at a time, so I tried tintless first and then added tint. I learned two things in the first run: a heat gun wouldn’t cut it, and that I had PET, not PET-G. So I replaced the heat gun with a 1500W space heater and visited every engineer’s friend: McMaster-Carr.
I then added the tint and for the life of me could not prevent bubbles from forming while deforming the plastic enough to get a decent shape. I even tried slowly ramping up the temp and drying out the plastic. Besides the bubbles, I noticed that the excessive heat caused the tint to adhere to the plastic’s surface – and as it deformed the tint bunched up. This created a surprisingly neat stress field visualization though! I can definitely say that window tint is a not a worthwhile route for vacuum forming (per my experience! Maybe someone else can get it to work).
Decided to go the more conventional route and use iDylePoly – but went with darker colors to get more of a reflective look. My goal was a brown/bronze tint anyways, and when I tested the brown dye it worked great for what I was going for. While researching ways to get more reflectivity, I found marinesniper’s forum post using graphite powder. My thinking was it couldn’t hurt and I could always take it off… I think it helped? It definitely darkened the visor, but any more than one full coat and visibility started to dip. It definitely added an extra layer to the visor so I’d recommend if you’re looking for something a little extra.
In the end got successful pulls on the HAZOP buck since it was much smaller, and got decent pulls on the grenadier visor (never got full suction but got the right shape). I could’ve fixed this with a larger table and plastic stock, but I didn’t feel like it was worth the effort for this specific project.
This is where the helmets diverged – I continued work on my helmet while the HAZOP helmet was shelved for the time being. Location and scheduling became a bit of a problem for my friend and I (as well as a sick nightwing costume we were working on) so the HAZOP helmet will be leaving us here
.Electronics
I was going for bright LEDs for the helmet flashlights, and found 650mA white LEDs on amazon after a few seconds of searching. I wired them in parallel with a CR2032 battery (1.5V), a power switch, and a 10 ohm resistor. Debated running a 9V battery, thinking it would last longer, but because of the power draw at a higher voltage they would end up lasting the same amount of time (at least with the same setup). Neat! It’s also a simple circuit, so a lighter battery is definitely more desirable anyway. In the future I’ll be running power through the main suit anyways, so this is a temporary circuit until that point.I’m planning to add a 40x10mm fan to the top of the helmet in the UA vent before I wear the helmet for any longer than a few minutes. Ventilation is key to comfort. These fans are 5 volts so I will need to either modify the existing wiring or add another circuit – either way, I will be spending more than 10 minutes on the next design
. The current wiring uses a lot of electrical tape and looks extremely disorganized because of how fast I got it in the helmet. I swear it won’t be like this forever!Finishing Touches
With all the main helmet parts done, I added some firm upholstery foam to the top, back, and sides of the helmet. The sections are about a half inch thick and when worn with a skimask they fit my head pretty snugly. My main requirement was not having the helmet fall off when I look upside down, which it didn’t! In the future I plan on looking into helmet padding (or whatever the mesh-y pads are) for more breathability and a better fit. This is fine for now though!The final cost for the helmet totals at around $250 if you include all the R&D and parts that weren’t used in the final product. If I was going to make multiple of these helmets, it would only set me back about $100 per, with the cost mainly going to paint and filament. This helmet took about a week of hands-on work and a week of printing time (if I had done it all in one go!). Not bad! And more importantly very repeatable.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this post – this helmet has been a goal of mine for the longest time, and I’m so happy I was not only able to finish it but additionally document it for the community. Besides starting my career, my eyes are set next on completing a full suit for HaloFest in December of 2026. Modelling has already begun! I tried to be pretty thorough with my process for this helmet but if you have any questions please ask! It’s always rewarding to work with others on something as great as this.
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