Amazing stuff! I was tempted to do something similar once, glad I didnt, I wouldnt of come close to this.
No offense, but that's the worst reason ever to avoid starting a project. When you're learning, there's a pretty good chance your finished products aren't going to look quite as good as those made by someone with years more experience. Somewhere in a deep, dark corner of my storage bin I have a horrid-looking suit of stormtrooper armor full of glaring inaccuracies and uncomfortable sharp edges. I still get to be proud of it because I made it myself. Otherwise, it's awful. You've got to start somewhere.
The internet is like the Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you look around, it's really easy to be discouraged by all of the ways that someone else, somewhere in the world is doing a better job of whatever your'e doing. You absolutely can't let that get in the way of learning your own lessons and taking on your own projects. If' I'd just looked online for stromtrooper armor back in 2002, I'd've found plenty of reasons to not bother making my own. Instead, I found inspiration and how-to articles (special thanks to
Studio Creations) and managed to gut through one of my first really complex builds. You've got to start somewhere. But, most importantly, you've got to start.
Thus endeth the sermon.
I submitted a couple of photos of this costume for the Halloween contest, but I figured I might as well go ahead and share them here too:
I still need to do a bit of fine-tuning, but I'm pretty happy with this build.
On the subject of fine-tuning, I've made some improvements to the lighting for the health tube:
What you're looking at is a series of superbright blue LEDs mounted into a piece of frosted acrylic rod which acts as a diffuser. A series of stripes drawn onto the visible side of the rod finishes the look:
I'm thinking I'll go back and re-do this again, actually scoring the lines into the rod so it will do an even better job of looking segmented.
I also went ahead and picked up one of the collector's edition plasma cutters from Epic Weapons. I'm not impressed. It looks the part, but it needs to be about 20% bigger. I'll probably start a build of my own in the next month or two.
Stay tuned...
