WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - lots of pics & videos!

indiefilmgeek

Sr Member
Heya, RPF friends!

I'm taking on a new build - and this time it's not Halloween or for the kiddos. This one is for the sheer joy of building something amazing to take to area conventions. I wanted to do something big, something mechanical, and something very recognizable. While I love nearly all big robots & mechs, many of them have been tackled by builders before - and some extremely well-done constructions can be found here on the forum.

Iron Giant was one of the least-done BIG robots I've seen. There are a couple of Iron Giant builds I've seen that look pretty good, but I wanted to go aggressively big with this one.

The sketch below is my concept drawing for a nearly 9ft tall Iron Giant costume - made mostly out of EVA foam.
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I've asked a good friend to 'pilot' this beast for me and he's accepted the role of wearing hot & heavy armor with limited visibility while wearing ~18" stilts. Friends like this are keepers, folks! lol

Since both my 'pilot' and I work full-time jobs and have multiple kids, we're making a full-body cast of him so I can have a doppelganger of him in my workshop to do the bulk of the costume scaling with. This will be a pretty fast build (for me). There is an area convention in late June that I'd like to have this ready for. That's about 10 weeks from now.

So to keep us on track and while our 'pilot' cast is being created I started on the Iron Giant robot head.

Lots of pics below...
 
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Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

NOTE: Most of this Iron Giant build will be constructed of EVA foam. But for the head, I wanted it smoother than I can get from foam... and possibly a display piece after the costume is done. So, I'm working this up in fiberglass/bondo - which will be cast in resin for the final costume piece.


Working from a low-poly model I unfolded the head:
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I then used fiberglassed to harden it - and bondo to smooth it...
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Lots of sanding... and more sanding... and more bondo... and more sanding... rinse, repeat...
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Then the first coat of primer... I fabricated the head fin from some old wood I had around the shop. I just used my scroll-saw to cut the basic shape and then used my sanding station to get the right angle. I also drew in the eyes.
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Then repeat the process for the jaw section...
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Finally with some primer on both pieces!
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This next part always scares me to death... I hate cutting out bits of my already smoothed pieces. But Iron Giant needs eyes!
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Finally, I used epoxy to attach the head fin and used more bondo on that...
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After even more sanding and at least one more spot bondo layer with a final sanding... here is the first coat of primer on the full thing...
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*****

My thought is that the fiberglass composition makes this piece a bit heavier than I'd like it to be. So, I think now that I have these two piece in decent shape, I'll make a mold and cast them in resin. This will save weight (and provide me a way to make a duplicate if the costume piece breaks.
 
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Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

Oh my goodness man this looks incredible! Such nice work so far I can't wait to see it all done, hopefully at a con too!
 
Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

Man oh man, I can't wait to see what more you come up with!!
 
Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

I don't have the patience to get something that clean with bondo. VERY impressive.

LOL... It's far from perfect! It probably doesn't show up in pictures, but I certainly didn't get all the unevenness out of that dome!


****

I should also mention that my plan is to do the VAST majority of this build in EVA Foam. I'm only doing the head in resin. :)

Thanks for all the kind words and encouragement! :)
 
Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

That is crazy cool. I'll be watching this thread for updates.
 
Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

Looking forward to how you tackle the arms. They are always a challenge on this type of build. Good Luck!
I was just about to ask...Will you be using a pully system (again),or simply black zentai to mask the arms operating the robot's arms,or something entirely different?
 
Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

Thanks for everyone's encouragement! I truly love how our community of creative talent rallies around fellow builders. All this certainly keeps me inspired to keep working on my projects!

Looking forward to how you tackle the arms. They are always a challenge on this type of build. Good Luck!

At the moment I'm thinking of allowing the pilot to reach out to the elbow area of the Giant's arm. From there, he'd be able to control most of the arm movements, and also provide hand opening/closing (if we add that functionality). Like George mentioned, it would be a more complex version of what I did for my 7yr old's Hulkbuster. The issue I had with the Hulkbuster was that the control point was the wrist of the larger arms, and that didn't let my son have much range of motion. I'll definitely sketches, progress pics and results... hopefully, I find something that works. lol




*****

Just the head alone would be a neat piece to have sitting around. Looks great!

Since we're casting it in Resin for our build, I might post an interest thread for folks that might want just the head - just as a display piece. The issue is, I worked this up for this costume. In this costume, this part is going to be 8ft above it's audience, so I didn't spend a huge amount of time smoothing the dome or removing all the imperfections. Those might need to be 'cleaned up' if folks wanted to finish a resin copy for close-up display use. :D
 
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Re: WIP - 9ft Tall Iron Giant Costume - Lots of pics

To begin working on the rest of the costume, we had to spend some time creating a copy of my 'pilot' so I could build to his size without having him standing in my workshop for hours/days/weeks. lol

We created this model of him and I now have it installed in my workshop (on the 18" tall stilts). The tape measure in the picture goes up a bit over 8.5ft, so you can get a feel fro the overall scale of the thing.
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After getting my hands on this, I've started to work up the foot and lower leg scaling. Here is a look at some of the paper pepping I've done from models I've created or modified from online 3D models. This is general reference material, as I'll scratch build most of this from EVA foam.

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I've had to enlarge this (lower-leg) section compared with the scale of the rest of the build to get the right height for his knees, but that's making the unmodified foot plans seem a bit small. So, I'll likely increase the size of the foot as well to make it feel matched to this piece.

More to come...
 
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