Bob McCormick
New Member
I'm a long-time lurker, first time poster and I wanted to share with you guys my first in-progress costume build. I'm going to attempt to build Gordon Freeman's HEV suit from the game Half Life 2. Wish me luck folks, because I've never done this before and I have no experience building any kind of costume or anything similar.
Since this is my first build, and I'm not exactly flush with free time, I've been looking for any ways to simplify and make this faster/easier. I figure if I can at least complete this first build, I can always get fancier and explore more in-depth techniques on future projects.
To that end, I've decided to go with the Foam/Pepakura building method. From reading about other people's projects here on the RPF and on other forums, that sounds like it's the most "noob" friendly method to get started building costume armor. Hopefully that will end up being true!
As near as I can tell, there seems to be only one set of HEV suit Pepakura files out there, which are the ones used in the "Enter the Freeman" mini-movie. Am I correct that those are the only ones? Anyone found any other HEV Pep files?
HEV Pep files:
First (mis)steps - building the forearm bracer.
The first thing I started on was attempting to build one of the forearm bracers. I built it first out of card stock, then rebuilt it as a slightly simplified version out of foam. It was pretty much a disaster.
Here's a couple of photos of the unfortunate forearm bracer:
As you can see, it looked like crap.
I did learn a few things though:
I decided to tackle a simpler part next, and went with the upper arm piece. I think that's turned out pretty well so far. I spent a considerable amount of time attempting to estimate the size and I think it paid off. I was also much more careful with my hot gluing.
Here's a few pictures of both upper arm piece.
Very simple pieces, but I think they turned out quite a bit better. It also gave me an opportunity to practice resizing. One of the problems with building an HEV suit is that it's supposed to fit like a glove. Which means you can't just rescale the model in Pepakura. If I did that with the upper arm piece, I'd have either ended up with something the correct length that was WAY to big for the diameter of my arm, or something the correct diameter but so short it'd look like I had a "LiveStrong" bracelet wrapped around my bicep. I'm not good enough with 3d modeling to change the proportions of the model, so what I ended up doing was a lot of cutting and splicing of the Pep template until I ended up with something the size needed that still seemed to approximate the shape and curves in the original model.
The next piece I'm working on is the upper leg piece. I like the way that piece has turned out so far. I'll post some pictures of it in the next day or two.
Since this is my first build, and I'm not exactly flush with free time, I've been looking for any ways to simplify and make this faster/easier. I figure if I can at least complete this first build, I can always get fancier and explore more in-depth techniques on future projects.
To that end, I've decided to go with the Foam/Pepakura building method. From reading about other people's projects here on the RPF and on other forums, that sounds like it's the most "noob" friendly method to get started building costume armor. Hopefully that will end up being true!
As near as I can tell, there seems to be only one set of HEV suit Pepakura files out there, which are the ones used in the "Enter the Freeman" mini-movie. Am I correct that those are the only ones? Anyone found any other HEV Pep files?
HEV Pep files:
First (mis)steps - building the forearm bracer.
The first thing I started on was attempting to build one of the forearm bracers. I built it first out of card stock, then rebuilt it as a slightly simplified version out of foam. It was pretty much a disaster.
Here's a couple of photos of the unfortunate forearm bracer:
As you can see, it looked like crap.
I did learn a few things though:
- Glue sticks work much better than tape for building Pepakura models out of card stock. :$
- It's a mistake to use too much hot glue. I ended up with big blobs of hot glue sticking out of every seam. And blobs of hot glue are not as easy to remove as you might think, although I did find the smearing them out with the tip of the glue gun works pretty decently.
- Getting hot glue on your finger burns... badly. :cry
- Test everything on small pieces of scrap material first! If I'd done that, I could have easily figured out proper hot glue technique with minimal waste of material.
- Sizing is difficult. The forearm bracer built out of cardstock looked pretty decent, but after I built it out of foam it was pretty obvious that it was way to wide for my rather skeletal-like arm proportions.
I decided to tackle a simpler part next, and went with the upper arm piece. I think that's turned out pretty well so far. I spent a considerable amount of time attempting to estimate the size and I think it paid off. I was also much more careful with my hot gluing.
Here's a few pictures of both upper arm piece.
Very simple pieces, but I think they turned out quite a bit better. It also gave me an opportunity to practice resizing. One of the problems with building an HEV suit is that it's supposed to fit like a glove. Which means you can't just rescale the model in Pepakura. If I did that with the upper arm piece, I'd have either ended up with something the correct length that was WAY to big for the diameter of my arm, or something the correct diameter but so short it'd look like I had a "LiveStrong" bracelet wrapped around my bicep. I'm not good enough with 3d modeling to change the proportions of the model, so what I ended up doing was a lot of cutting and splicing of the Pep template until I ended up with something the size needed that still seemed to approximate the shape and curves in the original model.
The next piece I'm working on is the upper leg piece. I like the way that piece has turned out so far. I'll post some pictures of it in the next day or two.
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