Samus Varia Suit WIP

Hi everyone !! This is my first post so be kind !! I've always loved Samus so I decided to make her Varia suit. Unfortunately with such a big design I don't expect to have her done until at least April or later ( I'll be debuting Samus for Dragoncon 2016)

This is also my first pepakura build so it's been a little rough but I will say fun....

So I started with files, my pepakura files were bought off etsy off Tetra Variations. (His samus files are super awesome totally worth it!)
And started with her shoulders . It took me about 9-11 hours to assemble each shoulder which resulted in a lot of paper pieces on my floor.

I then took both shoulders and the bottom half of the cannon and fiberglassed the both of them and put rondo on the inside. Then the fun part!! Bondo! Which resulted in bondo sanding more bondo more sanding. Because I have ocd with sanding 3 days later and yay finished cannon! I'll add spot putty to fix up minor holes etc. My shoulders are still in the process of being sanded and then applied with more bondo I'll hopefully have them done for Monday or Tuesday night. I used fluorescent orange acrylic to hold the lighting on the inside which is 15 red leds, I used white insulation as a diffuser and then placed a clear acrylic piece on the front , which seems to me works out great !

I'll keep adding to this post the farther I move along... but for now this is all hahaha.

Any questions feel free to ask! You can also find me on instagram where I post more frequently

ALSO don't mind my messy work room where i clearly eat sunchips and garage...

Yay! Great work so far! How heavy is that shoulder? Seems like you may have had to put on quite a bit of bondo to round out those facets.

By the way, if you'd like a secondary option just in case, I have my own pep files hosted on my blog. I didn't need to make peps for all of the pieces of armor so it's just the helmet, shoulders, chest, forearm, shins, and upper arm. I custom made these so you may find them to be slightly higher poly, which may help you reduce the amount of bondo you have to use.

I look forward to watching your progress!

The shoulder right now is sitting at about 4.5- 5 lbs per. As long as they stay below 15-20 lbs I can handle them for at least 8 hours as I wear a suit of armour where the shoulders are 15 pounds per.

Ah that doesn't seem too horrible. How do you plan on attaching and supporting them? How did you do the other armor? 15 pounds...yeesh. That doesn't sound fun.

The shoulders itself were made from Worbla The character was Lady Sylvanas from World Of Warcraft,, Unfortunately it was my first costume, and I ended up sculpting her skulls ( 3 per shoulder) out of air dry clay. Which ended up hardening and becoming super heavy. (unaware at the time) I covered all the skulls in Worbla and put gesso. Im really ocd about smoothness, so I actually put 14 layers of gesso!! ( seems absolutely insane now haha ) I trained for a solid 2 months, wearing the shoulders and hiking, walking etc, which resulted in lots of sweat, tears and passing out a few times in the start.

Because of the weight, she is only a one day costume and after the event im usually beyond wrecked.

Because Samus seems to have a soild chest piece without chest exposure, i could either a ) attach a strap to the shoulder and have the straps run across my chest and around to the back to buckle there. or b) attach the shoulder to the actual chest piece. The downside of that is sometimes the shoulders can pull on the chest making it super awkward for the wearer. She would then need a second strap around the bicep ( or attached ) to stop the shoulder from sliding back and forth.

First one was too big, second was too small and the third is clearly just right.

Ill be adding fans into the helmet so I can keep cool during the con.

Wow that sounds like a lot of work for those shoulders! Props to you for training to wear a cosplay! That's dedication.

For my shoulders I used some speaker wall mounts which have ball joints. You might look into something like that if you decide to support it off the chest like I did. They are able to rotate both via the ball and the threaded rod which attaches the ball part to the other side of the mount, so there's a lot of flexibility in how you could allow it to move. I actually ended up restricting mine to just the threaded rod (one axis of rotation versus three) since I didn't currently have a way to prevent the shoulders from hitting the sharp corners of the chest. Also, the ball joint is nicely restricted to a certain level of vertical movement which means the shoulders don't rest their weight on my arms at all which is good. They're limited to about, I dunno, like 30 degrees-ish vertically, but a full 180 degrees horizontally. Provides a useful range of movement. Oh yeah, also the shoulders can be easily slid up and out of their mounts - the joints are supposed to mount to the speaker via a slide, so I attached the slide to the shoulder and the joint to the chest. Gravity keeps the shoulders in place but I can easily slide them up and off the chest so it's not one giant, heavy piece of armor. Much easier to get on and off.
I talked a little about this in my thread here, and here's the link to the ball joints themselves.

Depending on what you need though, your ideas may work just as well. The ball joint obviously relies on having sturdy mount points and lightweight shoulders so it may end up being overly complicated or impossible.

And yay! Helmets! If you can't find enough space to fit a fan in there comfortably you might try squirrel cage fans. If you didn't know already, these are fans which blow out the thin side of the fan instead, allowing you to squeeze them along the sides of your head (pretty much the only space available, in my helmet at least) without them blowing in your ears. Aim them at the visor instead (mine gets super foggy!)
I plan on installing some of those in my helmet. Mine doesn't have enough room to fit a normal fan unless it's super duper tiny and even then I don't think I want it blowing on my mouth.

Thank you so much ! For all the info, I'll definitely look into the shoulder joint since it seems like a very neat idea !

As with my helmet I also don't have any room but besides the sides which is somewhat scary, thinking of the fan chewing up the side of my face hahaha. Most of the time I'm able to put them in the top of the helmet which blows down throughout the helmet. But like you said when your helmet fits perfectly there isn't much room but the sides.

Having a tiny air hole maybe underneath the mask (somewhere where no one would see) would reduce the fog. With my Pepper Potts helmet her eyes fog a lot so I had to make slits in her mouth and under the eyes to stop it