So I’ve been on a build-kick lately. It started off with building mini strandbeest kits, the Heart of Gold, to putting up wall shelving for my action figures and then to tinkering with with my car (fixing minor issues, painting over scratch marks, etc). Since Halloween is coming up soon and I’ve always made costumes out of bought stuff like my Dexter outfit or last year’s Driver from Drive, I decided to take a different route and build one from scratch this year. (Arguably the Shaun of the Dead costume from senior year was a semi custom build with blood splatter help from Bill)

Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit from the Half Life series, specifically the Mark V suit from HL2, seemed like a good start. Originally I was going to make something steampunk related, like I tell myself every year. I was even set on just making a steampunk robotic arm that I could wear but once I stumbled upon these guys , everything changed. These are the guys who made the amazing short Enter the Freeman. If I could create something even a quarter the quality of what they did I’d be content. The game changer was learning about Pepakura , a software that converts any 3D object into paper cutouts for a papercraft model. Inserting 3D models of the HEV suit from the game yields amazing results….for papercraft. Even though this was the impulse for me starting the HEV project, the papercraft method never really panned out.

My original grand plan was to print out the letter sized pages with the papercraft part layouts. Cut them out. Use them to trace out similar shapes on thin foam (3mm thickness, 99c sheets at Hobby Lobby), and then glue the foam together like I would with paper (and modify the flap system to something that works better with foam. Direct gluing or cardboard flaps). That did not come out as well as planned. The papercraft is so precise that there’s no way foam cutouts will fit together correctly, especially considering the fact that the paper model has crazy amounts of details from the game’s 3D models and ends up having tiny slits to asymmetrically curve pieces, etc, none of which can be done with foam. Spending 5 painstaking hours to make a crappy upper leg piece using this method led to a lot of frustration. At least I stumbled upon my final approach in the process (and learned how differently glued joints work).

The current approach that I settled on is to make a base layer for a limb with one sheet of foam, mostly keeping it cylindrical so I can velcro it with straps later on. Add a second layer on top of with and cut out shapes on this layer, adding contrast and depth to the piece.

It has worked well so far for the limb pieces and scoring along bend lines allows me to make more angular bends. This is needed for the forearm armor which has kind of a square cross-section rather than a cylindrical one.

The upper leg piece proved to be the most difficult so far, mostly because of its size. With tons of help from Patrick, we managed to finish most of the limb pieces yesterday (apart from the upper arm armor which should be the easiest to build). The velcro + webbing strap method has been very useful and hot gluing anything to the foam seems to work well. The main body armor is going to prove to be the most difficult. It’s a combination of angular and curved pieces that extend out, which means I’ll probably have to get styrofoam pieces on the inside to support them. But that’s for another long day.