Alex Danvers (Supergirl TV)

I'm using PETG for the joints and for the T fork connecting the top disc to the lower part. I'm tempted to print the joints using ABS and I have eSun ABS that matches the color of the eSun PLA used for many of the smaller parts (and it's only slightly lighter than the HK Silver PLA used for the larger parts). The problem with PETG is that while it's slightly flexible and quite strong, it will crack if bent too far, whereas ABS would break quite as catastrophically. I one of the PETG joints already cracked before the convention, but I haven't had any failures since. The cracked part was fixed with superglue (it was just a tiny crack) and I'll probably use it for one of the legs and just hope it lasts.

Almost everything is straight out of the printer. PETG tends to string a bit, but the strings come off quite easily. The clear PETG is lightly spray-painted with silver paint from a can.

The shoulder pieces have each one edge that isn't perfect. I did a bit of sanding and used 220°C soldering iron to smooth one of them, but neither side is currently perfect. I don't have a good work space for sanding and painting, so I'm trying to keep that to a minimum. I'm quite pleased with the surface finish of most of the parts and don't mind showing that they are prints as the print quality is quite decent. I mostly use 0.2mm layer height, but some parts are 0.1mm and others are 0.2mm/0.1mm hybrid. I think the most important thing in terms of print quality is that all the parts are designed to be 3D printed and there's a good print orientation for every part. In many cases, this means that I print quite a few smaller parts that twist-lock, screw, clip or snap together. No glue is needed in the armor build (the sword has epoxy glue in one spot), but there's a whole bunch of 5mm screws (ranging from 6mm to 25mm in length) and a couple of smaller non-machine thread screws and washers in the back piece. One of the pieces (the battery terminals in the smaller pistons) are designed so that they can be welded together in one spot.

Not using glue means I can diassemble and reassemble the armor quite easily and replace individual parts with upgrades (or replace broken parts, if that happens).
 
Incredible amount of planning you've put into your prints, I'd be tempted to model as much as possible in one piece, more for appearance than practicality, rather than actually creating each fastener separately. Ultimately your way is definitely better, I'm just impatient. Not working on anything now that needs to be printed, but I am re-modeling part of a room to work as a printing/soldering station. Will still sand and paint in the garage. :).
 
I count 96 separate 3D-printed parts in the current version of the armor without the legs. 20 of those are quick-release strap buckles.
 
The top of the thigh plate turned out to be the hardest part to do and that's just because all the reference images I had were awful. I almost gave up on the reference photos last night and just modeled something. It didn't feel right...the style was more like something that I would normally design. So when I got back home from work today, I just looked at the video material I had and found a few new frames. Nothing great and the top part still isn't anywhere close to accurate, but at least it's closer to the right style now and has some features that can be seen in the video.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it looks now. I can't print it quite yet as it still needs routes for wires and other small details like that. I'll get on those tomorrow and if things go well, I will also do some work on the bindings. I already did a modeling test of the lower leg binding using a new technique I thought of and it was quite promising, so maybe that bit will go smoothly.

Here's a render of what I have for the leg. There are four really large parts that are near the maximum size my printer can print and then some smaller ones too. All the parts fit and should print rather easily.

leg00.jpg

Fusion360 is kind of starting to struggle with the model. I have the left arm and the lower right arm in the same file and I have encountered some bugs in the "compute all" function, so things were going pretty slowly at times.

While looking at the video material, I came across this frame:

hollow0.jpg

The arm joint looks oddly disconnected from the lower arm. I'm not even sure if the parts are connected...
 
Very nice work. I don't know what your arm files are like, but that leg piece looks like it could be massive poly. Right now I'm working with 'the minimum necessary to complete something' and I keep everything in separate files - even small elements are detached from larger scenes to get them to render without crashing. I think there's a law about 'the amount of computing power is always less than the project at hand'.

About the screenshot arm joint, have you considered the 'real' rig isn't as complex as yours, and therefore might not be as complete as would actually be necessary to function? You are making an actual functioning exoskeleton, but in TV and movies a lot of shortcuts are taken.
 
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It was difficult to decide if I wanted to start the leg in a new assembly or add to the existing file. It worked out OK and in one place, it was beneficial to have everything in the same assembly.

Tonight was pretty much lost due to a printer failure. The filament had suddenly gotten stuck and was quite difficult to remove. The printer is back up and running now, but it's almost midnight...

The print had almost finished, but on inspecting it, I noticed that the model was also faulty. I have been having issues with Fusion 360 not saving files correctly and causing operations to fail when a "compute all" is performed. I just reported the problem to Autodesk (their support was great in dealing with an issue I had with the sword model in May), so hopefully this will result in a bug fix at some point.

I love Fusion 360, but it still has some odd bugs here and there. Given how big and advanced the program is, it's not surprising.

Even if I hadn't lost tonight's time on working on this, I had already decided to finish the leg "deck" and then quickly design and print the same type of attachment parts that I used on the arms. That way I will have working leg armors for DragonCon. If there's time, I can look into making the wrap around leg braces, but I suspect it will have to be after DragonCon.
 
Great idea to reproduce arm attachments for the legs. Should help in redundancy if something breaks, and also design cohesion. It will be interesting to see how robust a print you can produce of a wrap-around piece, particularly when your leg will be flexing.
 
Great idea to reproduce arm attachments for the legs. Should help in redundancy if something breaks, and also design cohesion. It will be interesting to see how robust a print you can produce of a wrap-around piece, particularly when your leg will be flexing.

The replica wrap-around leg braces will have to wait until after DC. I think they will be a fun design project, but things are hectic at work and I'm running out of spare time to put into this build.

I spent pretty much all day today on getting the leg armors printable. I went with the same type of attachment system as for the arms. If things go well, I might have most of the pieces printed by tomorrow evening and I'll be able to do the wiring & electronics. This leaves Monday & Tuesday as spare/packing days and for software upgrades. A few pieces will probably need fixes/tweaks, so I'll probably still be printing on those days.

I made some ugprades to the arm pieces last night and overnight to make more room for the electronics and to eliminate the pinching issue I had when I bent my arm.
 
The suit hardware build is complete (as far as DragonCon goes). All 114 neopixels lit up when I powered it up a few minutes ago. I'm packing now as my flight leaves in 14 hours. I'll try to work on the software a little bit at the hotel before the con (I have a few hours to kill there Thursday morning). The feature set is pretty much the same as at WorldCon. I would like to add a Cylon mode for the chest armor, some spinning animations for the joints and the ability to pick colors separately for the different part groups. We'll see...it's fine as it is, but it would be fun to have some bells and whistles in there (figuratively, not audibly). Being able to turn off the joint lights would make the suit a whole lot more authentic too.
 
DragonCon is over now and I can report on the durability etc.

One side of the shoulder piece mesh broke completely in transit to Atlanta, but it was fortunately easy to fix relatively cleanly in 10 minutes with a piece of fold-over elastic. Just enough delay to make me arrive slightly late at the RPF meeting, but nothing serious. I'll replace the part with a TPE version (flexible filament). PETG just cracks if you bend it too far and that's what happened here. It's possible I didn't pack it adequately.

I had intermittent connection issues with the neopixel strip connector throughout the weekend, but nothing serious. My choice of connector was probably the worst possible, so I will change to a different connector type. Back when I built the sword, I didn't have any crimp connectors (nor any experience using them).

The knee joints were performing admirably and I was really surprised they were holding up so well. I had no problems moving normally with the leg armors on.

The Heroes of CW shoot went well and there are some photos in the discussions of that Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/724700314364256

Up until fairly late at the Georgia Aquarium party, everything else was working great. Then, I noticed one of the cap pieces was a bit loose, so started to tighten it slightly, which then resulted in the threaded part breaking off completely from the base. Saturday was the last planned time to use the suit anyway, so I dropped off the right lower leg part at the hotel and went without it.

On my way to a panel slightly after midnight that night, some young women walking on the skybridge decided they didn't want to cross after all and one of them made a sudden U-turn and bumped into me, which caused me to drop the sword. The electronics compartment cracked near the guard and the connection to the neopixels became practically unusable. I took out the battery and called it a night a bit after.

I could stick to PETG for the knee joints and just increase walls & infill + add structural tweaks, but I may also consider a semi-flex TPE. ABS could also be a good choice, so I may finally give my silver ABS a try. My original joint design had an easily replaceable thread. Going back to that design may be a good idea, because if then if thread breaks again it can be replaced on the fly without soldering etc. The thread would also be quite easy to CNC (or machine by hand) from a stronger material.

Since I'm going to have to rebuild the electronics compartment from scratch, I'm going to look into making the connection between the hilt and the guard a bit more rigid.

I also lost the end cap of the sword sheath, but it was just a press-fit part that I knew might drop off at some point. I should have glued it on or at least designed teeth on it, so that it would have gripped the fabric that it was covering a bit better. It didn't really have much of a function other than screen-accuracy.

I had a photographer friend with me at DragonCon, so I have a bunch of photos that I'm going through at the moment. I need to clear my Lightroom edits with him before I post anything, so it might take a few days before I can show them to anyone. He got somewhat distracted at the time of the Heroes of CW shoot, so I only have my iPhone snapshots + whatever others have published from that shoot.

Many thanks to those who came to the Heroes of CW meeting. I skipped the big DC meeting, because I found a reason to wear my Black Widow costume on Saturday afternoon. I "was" Alex Danvers for about 4 hours on Thursday (RPF meeting & after that), maybe 6 hours on Friday (Heroes of CW) and around 6 hours on Saturday for the Aquarium party. Given the number of photos that were taken and compliments that were given, I would expect a few photos to pop up on the web pretty soon. I "was" Black Widow on Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. I had the Infinity Wars blonde hair on Sunday, so I'm pretty easy to find in the big Marvel photoshoot photos once those start to appear.

I'm kind of hoping to find a better wig (the one I have is a great color, but doesn't have a lace front). I should probably also thin the wig a bit to make it look more natural. I didn't find time to work on the software after DragonCon started – I'll get back to it once I'm home again.

Durability score: pretty good for a freshly designed cosplay and certainly adequate for Dragoncon.
 
Thanks for the report. Besides a few (unavoidable) setbacks, it sounds that everything performed as designed. Excellent work, congratulations! I hope those girls were sincerely apologetic Or at least hesitated long enough to see the damage they caused. . Looking forward to photos.
 
I think the exact description of their reaction would be "completely oblivious" and I'm not surprised. I printed two new parts for the knee joints using more walls and infill. I tried a few things to make the model stronger, but ended up using the original design after all. I haven't touched the sword yet, but I expect I'll make some design changes where the hilt and guard connect to make it stronger and I'll make room for a better display between the LED strip and electronics.

I'm posting here on a much happier note though...Here are some photos of the costume at Dragoncon 2017:

170901-19.40.43-0131.jpg170901-19.40.57-0131.jpg170901-19.43.07-0131.jpg170901-20.15.38-0131.jpg170903-02.40.35-0131-2.jpg

I changed the LED colors to blue/cyan for the party at the Georgia Aquarium. I guess Bizarro was sighted in the area...
 
Your build looks amazing!! Would I be able to borrow or buy a copy of your 3D print files for the sword please? No stress if you don't want to share :)
 
Coud do... I would need to write some printing instructions and decide how/where to post the files. MyMinifactory might be ok. If I use my own site, I don’t think people will be able to find the files very easily. Many of the parts print really tall, so good bed adhesion is important or prints will fall over.
 
I created an account on MyMiniFactory and uploaded a simple model just to see how it works. I'll try to get to uploading the sword later this week, but we'll see.

If there's interest, I'll have to see to do about documenting the electronics & software.
 
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