SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 5

Sanding and bondo work continued... One of the legs (on the left in the pic) seems to be coming along nicely while the other (the imperfect / warped) one is a major hassle. Because the pepakura model consists of low-polygon count design and the unit in the game isn't perfectly smooth (aside from the portrait) it's hard to determine how smooth to make the legs--that is whether to keep the appearance of sharper edges or to round everything off smoothly. I think I'm going to try and keep the front somewhat sharp and try and smooth out the back. It's taking a lot of body filler though, already went through a small tub of it. Might have to pick up a large gallon size portion for future pieces too.

Still a bit of work left to do on the legs but making slow forward progress I think.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 4

Spend a good part of the afternoon sanding down the legs, got most of one leg shaved and a small portion of the other.  While sanding the second leg I noticed more and more the quality discrepancy between the two, the second leg is 10000x inferior it's almost as if the model is warped.  It's a little disappointing but I'm going to try and make the best of it--hoping more bondo and more sanding will help alleviate the problem slightly.

Sanding down the bondo is a pretty time consuming and nasty process, a respirator and other personal protective equipment is definitely mandatory.  After working on the first leg I was covered in dust and swept up 1-2 cupfuls of fine powder.  The first leg isn't perfect and there's a lot of divots and imperfections in the surface.  I think I'll need to pickup some Apoxie sculpt which is like an epoxy clay to fill in areas, reinforce the leg openings, and build up the edges of sharp surfaces.

Hopefully I'll get to spend some more time working on the second leg tomorrow.  Bondo sands somewhat easily but requires a lot of patience when cutting through thick areas.  I found that rough bondo surfaces destroyed my 80 grit sandpaper pretty fast.  Bondo placement should be deliberate and precise to avoid / reduce headaches later.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 3

Worked on the legs a little bit, tiny progress--sanded the insides of the legs to remove the fiberglass jaggies and scuffed the outer suface of the legs to prep for bondo.  I picked up the 3M "bondo" variant which is technically called "body filler" as bondo is the name of the company from which the material name is attributed.  I was reminded just how foul the stuff smells due to raw styrene monomer present in the material--it's just horrid.  Thankfully much of the smell dissipates after the material is cured.  One thing I don't really like about the 3M body filler is that the hardener isn't a profoundly different color from the "resin."  One is gray and the other is white so when mixing the two it's pretty much impossible to tell if the material is thoroughly mixed like you can with standard bondo.  The 3M variety does cure to a nice light-gray solid though.

I coated the legs entirely with body filler and tried to contour the surfaces as best as I could in an attempt to minimize sanding time.  It was probably a futile attempt.  I also discovered / encountered a bit of a problem with the legs--after laying up the body filler I tried to "put on" the legs... but they don't fit!!  My foot can't squeeze through the opening now that the model is entirely rigid.  I'll have to improvise a solution eventually.  Cutting a slat in the back of the legs that goes through the entirety of the model or at least partially is one idea that came to mind--the slat can be re-affixed with some kind of latching mechanism and shouldn't detract from the look too much.  Tons and tons of painful sanding is foreseeable in the immediate future. 

Root beer quest

Was delighted to find this on my desk today when coming into work.  There's some good people that I work with, it brings a tear to the eye :'D.  

I guess I'm a little bit of a root beer connoisseur (or try to be) and like to pick up / try all sorts of varieties so I suppose one of my coworker friends decided to help me on my "quest."  One my current favorites right now is Natural Brew, it has a nice complex taste that's quite different from your run-of-the-mill "chemicals and soda water" root beer.  I'm looking forward to trying this one!

Edit: it's pretty good, very similar to Natural Brew, has a good complexity, slightly more apparent carbonation, it would be a hard pick to decide from the two.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 2

Last week I ordered some Epoxamite from Smooth-On to use in stiffening up the papercraft model of the Spectre legs I constructed. There were 3 different hardeners to choose from when buying the epoxy resin (101, 102, and 103). I ordered 102 which is a medium cure-time epoxy and found that the cure time is quite long. Next time I'd get the 101 to speed things up. Basically have to leave the material to cure overnight and then some with the 102.

Coated / laminated the outside of the pep model with a thin layer of Epoxamite and waited a day for it to cure. The rigidity of the model after the coating left a lot to be desired (card stock at large scales is pretty weaksauce flimsy) and the model was still flexible. So I separated the shin bit of the model from the boot bit and cut up some tight-weave (what I had on hand) fiberglass cloth and coated the insides w/ fiberglass. A day later and the rigidity is now at an acceptable level. Next steps will be to trim excess fiberglass and smoothen the inside of the model as the fiberglass is pretty sharp and rough / jagged.

The boot looks pretty hideous by itself. I'll need to make an incision and splice a few inches of length to the final segment so I can meld it to a pair of dress shoes I have laying around. I'm not yet sure how I'm planning to work with the shoes because if there's no flexibility in the model during walking in the toe area, the model will fracture / separate from itself or walking will look incredibly awkward.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 1

Spent a good part of this evening working on completing the other (left) leg armor pepakura piece for the Spectre cosplay.  The new piece looks like its of a little better quality than the one I did previously as a result of becoming more skilled at building pepakura models.  Hopefully this won't make any difference after "finishing" the pieces.

 

Since I constructed these pieces from card-stock paper it's a bit flimsy--so in order to add rigidity to the models the next step will be to do a fiberglass layup.  A lot of people seem to be able to get away with skipping fiberglass and just coating the model with fiberglass resin (essentially epoxy) to add a clear rigid coating to the material.  The downside to using resin alone is the end product may be a bit brittle and not quite as rigid as it would be after doing a proper fiberglass layup.  Downsides to the layup are time and mess due to the hassles involved with having to sand fiberglass.  I have a bit of fiberglass cloth laying around so that's the tentative plan.  Hopefully will be doing that step shortly.

SC2 Spectre cosplay update

Worked with the Spectre boot / shoe model a bit by isolating the mesh and playing around with it in Pepakura.  I measured out my leg and scaled the model accordingly, I noticed that the model of the boot itself is a little on the small side but the height seems to be fairly good.  Printed the pep files for one side (right leg) onto 110lb card stock, cut out the pieces, and taped everything together.

The sizing issue was confirmed in that the boot is quite small--I want to be able to mask over a real shoe with the finished pep piece so I'll have to splice a few inches of length into the piece later on.  The model otherwise seems to be pretty nice.  It's a single unit as it stands and therefore doesn't have any articulation in the ankle at all.  I plan to separate the shoe section from the shin bit so that I can hopefully walk freely.  There is some concern in that during walking, as the ankle rotates, the 2 pieces might grind into each other and destroy themselves.  Hopefully everything will mesh well enough that there won't be a problem, we'll see.

I'll have to make the other leg and then add fiberglass to stiffen up the piece and go from there.

Cosplay update and other things

Everything seemed to transition to Fall almost overnight... School is back in session, the weather turned cold, rainy, and terrible, leaves are falling, and the skies are perpetually dark.  Been pretty busy working and trying to find a job.  I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and have a tentative graduation date set for mid March.  I hope to land a job in the meantime.

I sent a few dimensions of my arms and some Spectre 3D models to my bff and he sent me some pepakura files for the arm armor of the Spectre cosplay scaled to my requirements (to fit my arms).  I printed out the unwrapped models and spent a while cutting and folding to build the framework for the armor.  However, while I kind of noticed this when I printed the sheets, there appears to be a "small" size descrepancy with the pepakura model and the size of my arms.  I finished building the pepakura model regardless and took a few pics.  Hopefully we can sort out the scaling issue and have properly fitted arms shortly.

Cosplay Project: Starcraft 2 Spectre (Spectreprops)

I've kept it a bit of a secret up till now but me an my bff are doing a cosplay collaboration.  The cosplay is of a Starcraft 2 unit, one of the coolest if not the coolest unit among the Terran arsenal, the Spectre.  The plan is pretty intensive and we were a bit more ambitious than we could realistically achieve for a  first time project so we've simplified some aspects of the project.  However, we are both extremely detail oriented so everything should be top-notch in terms of quality and realism. 

My bff is currently working on a key feature of the cosplay, the helmet.  He's making great progress on it and it's really starting to take shape right now.  The spectre design is pretty cool as most of the armor components integrate with each other, ie: the tubing connecting the helmet to the chest armor.  Progress can be seen at Spectreprops, be sure to follow his blog to receive email notification of updates. 

The Spectre armor incorporates lots of cool lighting elements so I'm excited to integrate these into the design as cool lighting makes everything infinitely better.  A few YouTube videos are below to get a better look at the Spectre itself:



And a full body shot showing the lighting that "courses" through the armor and clothing.  It should be fun.

Ridiculous Pug Video

Spent a bit of last Saturday out at a dog park with some friends as they wanted me to shoot some video of their dog doing "dog stuff" or should I instead say their pug doing "pug stuff."  Hopefully this video won't be the black sheep of my YouTube channel, we'll see--it's a bit ridiculous.


On another note, I want to try and move forward with my cosplay project so hopefully there will be some new posts about that coming up in the future.