Rubies Vader Eyes?

[Happy13178]

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, this one looked like the right one.

Hey there, so a little while ago I got my first vader costume, and being the obsessive personality I am, started looking around for way to make it better and started looking into modding the helmet. Never really been into this before, but it looks like an awesome hobby.

Here's my question. From what I've gathered, the Rubies is based on the ANH helmet? I'm getting ready to start in on modding it a bit, but I wanted to know what the best way is to do the eyes? Found the lenses and mesh from fenix, but how deep do the eyes need to be, and what's the best material to remold them?

The things I'm going to do to the helmet are fix the helmet mount to try and correct the angle, fill in the nose, square off the bars over the mouth (not sure I'm up to totally cutting them off and repositioning, but I'd like to get rid of the rounding), fix the tearducts, and fix the neck flare. The dome I may tackle afterwards, saw a few threads on reinforcing the inside with fiberglass, was going to use this to do it: Bondo | Bondo Resin Repair | Home Depot Canada since it looks like it has what I'd need to do it. Thoughts?

 

[postmanpat]

Have a look at this link;

The Darker Side

This guy has gone all out in modding his Rubies helmet. Might give you some good ideas.

 

[Happy13178]

I saw that, and I'm definitely using some of his techniques, particularly with the dome, but his techniques for the eyes are a bit beyond me. I'd like to know if theres a more straightforward way to do them and get the depth right.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

Have a look at this link;

The Darker Side

This guy has gone all out in modding his Rubies helmet. Might give you some good ideas.

Personally, I would take inspiration from how he did things, such as cutting the desired shape in wood to use for support when reshaping and forcing the plastic into a new position, but otherwise do not follow any of his suggestions regarding "fixes". He removed accurate shapes and details as well in his quest to "improve" the helmet, taking it further away from accurate than it originally was. No offense to the guy, but if you want accurate, then that's a step away instead.

Find as much reference as you can of the original helmets of the specific version you want to recreate - A New Hope / Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi. RotJ style would be the easiest as that's the source of the licensed helmets prior to eFX.

There are a lot of things to do to get this to looking presentable. It will never be exactly accurate, but it can get closer than how it looks in stock condition.

 

[Celtic007]

Along with what Too Much Garlic said, don't change the dome length either. You only need to fix the dome mount. For me, I just completely removed it from both the facemask and the dome. I riveted the back half of a skateboard helmet to the facemask and now the dome rests at the perfect angle (with a little padding between it and the facemask).

For the eye sockets, I got some Apoxie Sculpt and just made them deeper. This, of course, is after I dremeled away the little tabs for the Rubies lenses.

Mine ended up looking like this, although I was never happy about the way the dome came out. It could probably use a better paint job, but it was fun to work on and a good learning experience.

 

[Happy13178]

I saw your thread about that, you did a great job on it. I was never going to play with the length of the skirt, since to my untrained eye, that never looked to be much of an issue. Darker side's work on the bell shape of the skirt was pretty good, but I think some of it was nitpicking, I thought the placement and angle of the dome was the biggest issue there. I think there's probably a few ways to redo the dome ridge, but reinforcing the inside first is going to be needed regardless how I approach it.

The tearducts don't look to be that difficult, can fill in the existing ones and dremel out new ones without too much effort, filling in the little gaps on the nose also not too bad. I think my biggest issue with the helmet is around the mouth between the tusks, it looks like the right side when facing it is lopsided, but I can't see how I would fix that at my skill level, so I'm just doing what I can. Truthfully I was thinking about picking up a helmet off of korbanth and just using this as a project one, but I'd still like to do it as well as I can.

As far as the eyes go, how much Apoxie (brand name?) did you put in to get the right depth? Did you just eyeball it (no pun intended) or were you going for a specific measurement?

 

[Too Much Garlic]

The lopsidedness to the mouth is an accurate feature, so not really one of the things you should fix.


(don't mind the picture, it's from my symmetrical experiment, but it shows how weird the helmet looks when mirrored)

Apoxie Sculpt is made by Aves and is a fantastic medium. Always wear gloves when working with it. It's a 2-part self-hardening resin product that can be smoothed with water.

 

[Celtic007]

As far as the eyes go, how much Apoxie (brand name?) did you put in to get the right depth? Did you just eyeball it (no pun intended) or were you going for a specific measurement?

Yeah, I basically eyeballed it and did it to what looked like a decent depth.

This is what I used.
I got the 1lb
Apoxie® Sculpt

Its pretty easy to work with. You just mix equal parts of A and B and mush it around until it is a uniform color. It takes a full day to dry and then you can sand and do whatever else you need to it.

 

[Malphas]

Love Aves but millput is the same if you need it right now. Places like Hobby Lobby carry it.

 

[Happy13178]

I'm not in a rush, will source out some Apoxie in Toronto when I have time. I've seen in other threads that it doesn't go bad all that quickly, if at all.

I was going to pick up the lenses, eye mesh and mouth mesh from fenixprops on Ebay, and possibly the tusks as well. I'm assuming this is the same fenix that I've seen other guys mention in here? He looks like he has good items...