Mr Bonky
New Member
So I am a first time costume/suit maker and thought I would post my pics and lessons learned from building my first cos-play thing ever. Last year when Iron Man 3 came out, it inspired my friend and I to make our own suits. As cool as Iron Man is though, I remembered back to how freaking awesome I thought War Machine looked in Iron Man 2. Never did like the War Machine Mk2 so much from Iron Man 3. And maybe its just me, but I pretty much loathe the Iron Patriot suit lol.
Anyways, so when I decided to start building this suit, I had no idea there was such thing as Pepakura and all these helpful tools most of you on this site use lol. So basically I started off on building my suit by "eyeballing" movie screen shots and tracing them out onto poster board. Hoping to cut them all out and trace them onto metal lol. Didn't take me too long to realize that this was looking like massive DUMP using this method, or at least my level of artistic ability wasn't at the level lol. So I started actually doing some homework and found YouTube videos of Stealth and James from xrobots and was blown away at their detail and how legit their suits were! So I found this amazing piece of software called Pepakura, and my life was changed
Below are my current progress pics and lessons learned while making this. I hope that there is at least one single piece of information or picture portrayed here that can help another fellow cos-player here to help make their War Machine suit (or similar foam costume) super legit!
Alright so I'm going to post piece by piece and any lessons learned from there or any additional tidbits! Alright so to start off, after I downloaded all the pepakura files (mostly from Stealth I think) I was like, "YEAH, THIS IS AWESOME! Lets start off with one of the most crucial pieces even though Ive never done this before!!" Which leads me to my rule number one of foam armor building:
#1) If you are new to Foam Pepakura armor building, DO NOT START with the most important pieces of the armor lol. (IE: The Chest Piece, The Helmet, Anything that is mostly the center of attention for your suit.) Start off with a less important piece like the boots or biceps or forearms or something. Not that those aren't important, but in comparison to the focal points of your suit, they are... Building your first couple of pieces, you will teach yourself invaluable foam armor building lessons lol
As you can see from my pic below, I started out with the COOLEST PIECE imo, the chest piece. It didn't turn out super bad. But upon close review of my first piece it is very evident I didn't know how to make clean joints and wasn't quite sure how to hot glue "cleanly". I think the entire time I was building this I was just feeling so cool that I was making my very first suit and it would all turn out ok in the end lol. That and I was under the impression the coating stages of the suit building would fill in all these DUMP looking edges and gaps in my angles lol. After I finished the front chest piece, I made the back piece to the chest piece. As you can tell below, I started to get a little bit better at angles and glue techniques with the back piece. But it wasn't really until I finished the front and back to this chest piece to where I finally feel it "clicked" in my head how to do these angles and gluing techniques "well". After finishing these two pieces, I had a friend help me hold them together to get them glued together as precisely as I could. Again, lots of lessons learned here for myself on how this foam pepakura armor thing works lol
A few other golden rules to know and use that I learned from this chest piece are thus:
#2) ONLY cut your angles into the foam armor pieces AS you cut them out of your foam rolls, and ALWAYS use a brand new razor when cutting your angles on the edges of your foam. At the least a very new razor. The reason for this is becuase you will get 100% legit looking angles cut into the sides of each individual armor piece cut out. The reason I say this is, there are videos and people out there that will teach you to cut your angles in the foam pieces after you cut them out of the foam rolls. This does work, but it is significantly harder to cut angles in the foam very accurately!! Most cases you wont get perfect triangle edges, and even more often on really really small pieces you wont even be able to hold the piece properly to cut an angle out of it anyway! Also the instant you feel you start to "saw" through your foam pieces, INSTALL A NEW RAZOR. SET THAT DULLER RAZOR ASIDE, and maybe just use it for random cutting shenanigans, or for getting the bulk of your stuff cut from your foam mat rolls. Using a brand new razor is not only way easier and feels like a hot knife through butter, but it makes WAY CLEANER cuts and legit straight looking lines.
#3) When gluing your individual pieces together, only glue about 1 to 2 inches max at a time along the lengths of your foam fittings. This allows you to dedicate maximum focus to eyeballing the foam edges to fully ensure that your edges that you are gluing come out perfectly straight. Gluing too many inches of length together at a time and you will soon realize almost all cases, you will not be able to make perfectly straight edges because you will be trying to keep all these different areas straight, under the slippery stress of holding still wet hot glue in between foam pieces.
#4) When gluing your individual pieces together, lay down a line of glue a tiny bit extra than what may seem to cover the job of gluing the pieces together. This will allow the hot glue to completely coat the inside edge of the foam 100%. I even go as far as to recommend that you let a little hot glue spooge out the seams a "tiny bit". This will visually prove to you that the entire edge is glued, and create solid feeling armor. I also recommend that you don't allow this extra spooged out glue to dry all of the way. Just allow it to mostly cool, then peel it away from your edges to leave as little glue left on your edges as possible. If you let the spooged out glue completely dry, you run the small risk of tearing your foam with you peel/rip the left over glue off your edges.
#5) Use the tip or the edge of the tip of your glue gun to melt down flat the extra glue residue left over from your gluing edge pieces together. Most glue guns have a pyramid shaped tip that works well enough. I was fortunate to have a glue gun that had a flat type of needle, which allowed me to really use the side edge of the hot tip to melt away and completely flat the left over glue residue. This helps create sharp/crisp and legit looking edge joints.
That's it for now on this post. I'm going to segment my posts and progress into small chunks of posts, as to not make one long huge "this is my whole suit and its progress in one post" type of thread lol
Anyways, so when I decided to start building this suit, I had no idea there was such thing as Pepakura and all these helpful tools most of you on this site use lol. So basically I started off on building my suit by "eyeballing" movie screen shots and tracing them out onto poster board. Hoping to cut them all out and trace them onto metal lol. Didn't take me too long to realize that this was looking like massive DUMP using this method, or at least my level of artistic ability wasn't at the level lol. So I started actually doing some homework and found YouTube videos of Stealth and James from xrobots and was blown away at their detail and how legit their suits were! So I found this amazing piece of software called Pepakura, and my life was changed
Below are my current progress pics and lessons learned while making this. I hope that there is at least one single piece of information or picture portrayed here that can help another fellow cos-player here to help make their War Machine suit (or similar foam costume) super legit!Alright so I'm going to post piece by piece and any lessons learned from there or any additional tidbits! Alright so to start off, after I downloaded all the pepakura files (mostly from Stealth I think) I was like, "YEAH, THIS IS AWESOME! Lets start off with one of the most crucial pieces even though Ive never done this before!!" Which leads me to my rule number one of foam armor building:
#1) If you are new to Foam Pepakura armor building, DO NOT START with the most important pieces of the armor lol. (IE: The Chest Piece, The Helmet, Anything that is mostly the center of attention for your suit.) Start off with a less important piece like the boots or biceps or forearms or something. Not that those aren't important, but in comparison to the focal points of your suit, they are... Building your first couple of pieces, you will teach yourself invaluable foam armor building lessons lol
As you can see from my pic below, I started out with the COOLEST PIECE imo, the chest piece. It didn't turn out super bad. But upon close review of my first piece it is very evident I didn't know how to make clean joints and wasn't quite sure how to hot glue "cleanly". I think the entire time I was building this I was just feeling so cool that I was making my very first suit and it would all turn out ok in the end lol. That and I was under the impression the coating stages of the suit building would fill in all these DUMP looking edges and gaps in my angles lol. After I finished the front chest piece, I made the back piece to the chest piece. As you can tell below, I started to get a little bit better at angles and glue techniques with the back piece. But it wasn't really until I finished the front and back to this chest piece to where I finally feel it "clicked" in my head how to do these angles and gluing techniques "well". After finishing these two pieces, I had a friend help me hold them together to get them glued together as precisely as I could. Again, lots of lessons learned here for myself on how this foam pepakura armor thing works lol
A few other golden rules to know and use that I learned from this chest piece are thus:
#2) ONLY cut your angles into the foam armor pieces AS you cut them out of your foam rolls, and ALWAYS use a brand new razor when cutting your angles on the edges of your foam. At the least a very new razor. The reason for this is becuase you will get 100% legit looking angles cut into the sides of each individual armor piece cut out. The reason I say this is, there are videos and people out there that will teach you to cut your angles in the foam pieces after you cut them out of the foam rolls. This does work, but it is significantly harder to cut angles in the foam very accurately!! Most cases you wont get perfect triangle edges, and even more often on really really small pieces you wont even be able to hold the piece properly to cut an angle out of it anyway! Also the instant you feel you start to "saw" through your foam pieces, INSTALL A NEW RAZOR. SET THAT DULLER RAZOR ASIDE, and maybe just use it for random cutting shenanigans, or for getting the bulk of your stuff cut from your foam mat rolls. Using a brand new razor is not only way easier and feels like a hot knife through butter, but it makes WAY CLEANER cuts and legit straight looking lines.
#3) When gluing your individual pieces together, only glue about 1 to 2 inches max at a time along the lengths of your foam fittings. This allows you to dedicate maximum focus to eyeballing the foam edges to fully ensure that your edges that you are gluing come out perfectly straight. Gluing too many inches of length together at a time and you will soon realize almost all cases, you will not be able to make perfectly straight edges because you will be trying to keep all these different areas straight, under the slippery stress of holding still wet hot glue in between foam pieces.
#4) When gluing your individual pieces together, lay down a line of glue a tiny bit extra than what may seem to cover the job of gluing the pieces together. This will allow the hot glue to completely coat the inside edge of the foam 100%. I even go as far as to recommend that you let a little hot glue spooge out the seams a "tiny bit". This will visually prove to you that the entire edge is glued, and create solid feeling armor. I also recommend that you don't allow this extra spooged out glue to dry all of the way. Just allow it to mostly cool, then peel it away from your edges to leave as little glue left on your edges as possible. If you let the spooged out glue completely dry, you run the small risk of tearing your foam with you peel/rip the left over glue off your edges.
#5) Use the tip or the edge of the tip of your glue gun to melt down flat the extra glue residue left over from your gluing edge pieces together. Most glue guns have a pyramid shaped tip that works well enough. I was fortunate to have a glue gun that had a flat type of needle, which allowed me to really use the side edge of the hot tip to melt away and completely flat the left over glue residue. This helps create sharp/crisp and legit looking edge joints.
That's it for now on this post. I'm going to segment my posts and progress into small chunks of posts, as to not make one long huge "this is my whole suit and its progress in one post" type of thread lol
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