Re: "It's About Time!" Starcraft II Terran Marine CMC Armor WIP *PIC HEAVY*
Finally back to foam work! Yipee! Now how to go about doing that... I was honestly stuck. I did some searching and couldn't find a complete/accurate enough pep file. However, looking at the armor sets people have done using pep I could tell it wasn't the tactic I wanted to use. They typically end up very angular which works great for Halo MC's, stormtroopers and of course Iron Men. However, as you can see, This set is very fluid and organic. Lots of curves, not many hard angles at all. I had even extraced the game files and planned on using Pepakura Designer made by Tamasoft and combining that with XRobots' video on converting to foam templates. I spent a while trying to successfully unfold my model but the extracted version wasn't enough detail and mine was WAY to hi-res to work well.
Therefore! I had to come up with another way to shape my foam into such rounded pieces. Yes, at this point I had decided that EVA foam floor mats would be the way to go. They are cheap(ish) and very readily available when I need more. They run $20 for a set of four 2'x2' puzzle pieces at your local Lowe's. I say cheapish because I had no idea how far or, in this case, how NOT far one pack will go. I'll keep you tallied on the number of sets I've had to buy so far :wacko
Other materials and tools you will need are a heat gun of some sort, a hot glue gun and hi-temp glue sticks, contact cement, a dremel or file, duct tape, cardboard (lots) and a nice sharp razor blade and sharpener. As you know, foam dulls razors really quickly. You could just stock up on loads of blades and swap them out every so often, but I prefer a sharpener because it's quicker, makes the blade sharper than new, and of course only a one-time expense so way cheaper. Also, a breathing mask, safety glasses, and rubber gloves are nice to have. Using a dremel with a sanding bit on foam produces a fine dust that gets everywhere and probably shouldn't be breathed. That goes for the contact cement as well; use it in a well-ventilated area as the fumes can be toxic. Go safety!
OK with that out of the way, I'm starting at the bottom of the suit and working my way up so I don't miss anything and have to come back later. I wasted one square of foam on my first attempt at simply trying to heat and form it into something close to the lower leg. I used a basketball and a football to try and stretch the stuff into shape. NOTE: EVA foam will form very well, but there is a limit on how far it will stretch. either it's not as tight of radius as you'd like or it tears. Rolling foam into a tube is one thing, but trying to get a nice domed surface is much more difficult. I was getting frustrated.
I decided the best way to get the shape I wanted was to have a mold of some sort I could wrap the foam around. I needed something cheap to create my positive from and remembered those wooden dinosaur puzzles that are wood sheet that's cut to slide together perpendicularly. (If that wasn't already a word, by golly it is now!) So I used my Solidworks model to mock up a cross section I could cut out in cardboard. I offset the outer surface a half inch and used that as the boundary for the edges of the frame so that the end product would have the same physical size as the model. I printed off the sections, cut them out, glued them onto the cardboard, cut those out and glued them together.
I thought I'd try to be clever and just heat up the foam and stretch it over my frame to get the right shape. Save some time right? Not so much.. the cardboard wasn't hefty enough to press against to stretch the foam, so I beefed it up with spray insulation foam and duct tape to try again. Again, not much luck. It was impossible to get a consistant shape and I was terrified to try three more times. Another sheet of foam wasted. (I did end up using those sheets later on for smaller areas so it wasn't a complete loss). Back to the drawing board.
I scoured all my sources for a better way to get the shape I was after and finally stumbled on Evil Ted's YouTube video about how to make a helmet. Check it out
HERE. In simple terms, he uses a base that's the shape he wants the inside of the foam to take. A buck simliar to what you'd make for vacuum forming, if you will. Sounds familiar! Then he covers the shape in a couple layers of aluminum foil or plastic wrap and duct tape, scribes cut lines at key areas, then cuts the flat pattern. Transfer the pattern to the foam and "Voila!" Brilliant! Much thanks to Ted for sharing this method!
I removed the duct tape from the cardboard, filled in the gaps on one side with an open-cell mattress pad and carved it to shape. The calves are symmetric so I really only needed one half then flip it over. Next, I wrapped that half in aluminum foil, then went over that with a thin layer of duct tape.
I cut it along the cardboard outlines because they'd already been so strategically placed, seperated the pieces, flattened them out, cut a few reliefs and traced the pattern onto the foam.
I cut the pieces out very carefully, heated and bent them each individually so they'd contour nicely around the fram in the appropriate spot, and used contact cement to glue them together. Let me just say, I'm totally sold on the contact cement! Much finer seams than with hot glue and the pieces hold much stronger. I did the boots completely with hot glue and it worked, but if I were to redo them I'd go the latter route. Eventually I got this:
That's more like it! Never let it be said that you can't get complex curves out of foam! I did it again, flipping the templates over to get the mirror image, cut, bent and glued that half, then stuck em both together.
At that moment, and only just then, I knew I could do this and I'd see it thru to the end. Up until then I still wasn't so sure. but it came out so beautifully i had no doubt after that. Onward and upward!
