My first build: Daft Punk Helmets (in Progress)

[chaba]

Hey guys,

I've been trying to get into prop making as a hobby, and as a first Project I tackeled making Daft Punk Helmets -with electronics - as costumes for me and a friend.

I'm going to follow Tekparasites build on the Thomas one, but since I can't sculpt well and didn't want to buy a cast (im a college student so I am on a budget),
I decided to 3d-Print them using these two files from Thingiverse.com. My deadline is early-mid febuary for having the actual helmets done, but the electronics will probably take longer. I'm writing this thread because there are still a few things I might need help with and I thought maybe you guys would be willing to help me out also I appreciaty all tips you have for me

Current Status:

Right now I printed both Helmets printed, bondoed, sanded and then primed. I also wrote the Code for the arduino I am going to be using for lighting in both helmets and have begun soldering the Thomas one, altough I still need to order the leds for the matrix. I still need to do both visors, do lighting and get them to look like chrome for cheap somehow (ugh that one is gonna be tough).
I still need to do a bit of spotfixing, I've seen most of you use bondo spot putty for this, but they dont sell that where I live (Germany). What are good alternatives for spotfixing?


Current Questions:
- How can I get a good chrome (and gold) color without actually having to chrome it?
- What can I use to fix the rest of the spot?

Progress:

So I printed out both of the Helmets from the files above, and calbetied and glued them together (which wasn't all that simple because my 3d printer is self-built and can suffer some inacuracies) and ended up with something like this:



Then I bondoed and sanded the helmet and put some primer on:
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in the pics he still has no ears, but I have added those since. will take new pictures later today.

 

[chaba]

For electronics I plan to do the same thing Tek did: I got myself a sure-electronics 8x32 LED matrix and hooked up an arduino to it. Sadly I couldn't get the code he provided in his thread to work for me, so I made my own. These are the lighting modes I have so far:

Today I went ahead and cut off the LEDs on the driver chip so I could wire them to a self-made LED matrix. here is the board with headers soldered to it:



For Visors: Doing the Thomas one will not be a problem, I plan on getting some acrylic glas from a hardware store, heat it in my oven and then bend it - pretty straight forward. The Guy-man one will be more complicated. But since my father has a vacuum-forming machine at work and Ben Dinger on thingiverse was nice enough to give a printable mold for vacuum forming a visor, I will print that. I'm half done with that now, but I ran out of filament so I will have to wait for the other half.

Do I have to sand this too or does it not matter because it will just be the inside?

 

[chaba]

These are the two now, I still need to fix the visor lid on the Thomas one, but otherwise I only have electronics, paint and visor left to do:
View attachment 421939 View attachment 421940 View attachment 421941 View attachment 421942 View attachment 421943

 

[chaba]

Update: Visor is done, I got spray-tint and PET from a home depot store, pretty straight forward. It looks kinda off though, somehow. I don't know why