Day 4: Male & Female Breastplate Detailing

We did a little more fine tuned shaping of the female breastplate with our heat gun, we found it works much better to heat gun the smooth side, the bumpy side is much more likely to get a little burned and distorted, which is bad since that's the side you see!

Well now that I have a female breastplate that I am somewhat satisfied with it was time to add in the detailing.  Can I tell you how nervous we were??!!  It took all this time to get a decent breastplate and we are going to go at it with a freaking dremmel tool?!First we fired up the projector and drew the lines on with a Sharpie permanent marker.

Well within a minute my husband Trevor had messed up a line already.  He is very precise, but it turns out the breasts were not exactly the same size.  From far away you can't really tell, but if you start drawing exactly even lines on them, then it is noticeable.  He was in a panic, but luckily I clued him in on a secret which I will now share with you.  It is very easy to remove sharpie with plain old rubbing alcohol.

So we got some better lines drawn on and thank god we managed to dremmel it without messing it up! I am pretty pleased with our result!

Next we went back to the male breastplate and continued to add detail lines to it as well, and added the next 2 pieces to the chest and stomach.  Our technique of sanding away foam and adding the thin craft foam for the black areas is going really well.

Day 2 & 3: Female Breastplate

So before we get too much further in our armor build we wanted to tackle what I think is going to be the hardest part, the female breastplate.  Now I am going to be talking more about breasts than I ever thought I would on the internet so if you are a dude, please feel free to skip this entry entirely because this will only be of a help to anyone making female Mass Effect armor.  That being said, I wanted to be as specific as possible because as a girl I felt there was a lack of specific information on the internet, I can find a lot more blogs on how to make male armor than on how to make female armor, which is unfortunate because the female amor is certainly more difficult.

So I have been reading EvilFX's blog:
 http://bioweapons.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/mass-effect-n7-armor-build/
and he just kinda got some half round objects and put the foam in the oven on broil and shaped it that way.  Now that all sounds great, but I was hoping to find some slightly more specific instructions, I am a scientist in my day job so I like to have very thorough protocols to follow with exacts times and temperatures, ect...  So I did a LOT of searching on the internet for good instructions.  I also, errrr, hmmmm, am not a small girl in the breast area, hahahaha.  So I also needed to make sure that my boobs would fit inside whatever armor we ended up making.  So I didn't want to use any old half round objects, I needed to find some that were big enough.  I went to the craft store JoAnn's and they had 6" round styrofoam balls which seemed about the right size.  I brought them home and I just literally stuck them in my bra and got a sharpie and marked where the edge of the bra cup ended on each ball.

I then cut the balls on that line (which ended up being a little bigger than half the ball).  We then needed to size the armor to fit the size of the breasts.  So we got out our projector again and lined up about where they should go, we left them in the bra which we figured would help to space them an appropriate distance apart.  (which I also think makes for a really funny picture, hahahahaha)

So now that we had the spacing and everything set, we nailed our styrofoam balls to a piece of plywood.  We also cut out a second piece of plywood (which is pictured further down) to help press the foam into place.

Now it was time to heat the foam, so people on the forums suggested 15 min at 250F so we gave that a try, the funny thing is the foam didn't quite fit in the oven, so we just had to leave the door open.  It also started curling as it heated.

Well, we were now ready to try our first stretch!

So unfortunately the foam was sitting on the oven rack and the lines of the oven rack melted into the foam on the underside so we got some very funny stripey breasts.

We tried again but put it on a cookie sheet, oh wow, that was even worse!  The middle didn't melt, but the edges melted even worse!

So at this point I realized that baking it really was not the way to go.  EvilFX uses the broil, which means the heat comes from above and hopefully that means the bottom won't melt as fast.  So we threw it in the broiler and literally after only a minute the foam started to heat up (broil is at a MUCH higher temperature than bake).  So we finally got something that was pretty decent looking.  Although the broil can be tricky, even a few seconds too long and the foam on top will melt, which is unacceptable since that's the side you see.

So we went back to our projector, drew out the lines and cut the piece out, and I mean it looked pretty decent, but it was certainly a bit small and did not actually fit over my breasts.

It was late, and we decided to call it a night and start fresh the next day.

So the next day we decided to try just making the styrofoam balls a bit further apart, which did work, but it just looked STUPID, hahahaha.  We tried getting some foam discs and placing them under the styrofoam to make them taller, but then it was hard to press the wood on top all the way down, so that also ended up making them look stupid.  We went back to the craft shop to buy the next size up styrofoam ball, which was 8", but those just looked laughably enormous!  Finally we settled on making the 6" balls just a teeny bit further apart, but also making the cut out on the top piece of pressing wood bigger and that worked ok.  So now that we finally had the breasts a decent size and shape, we needed to worry about the overall shaping of the breastplate which is a whole different can of worms.  Ugh!

So if you look here on this earlier picture you can see that when you try to pull the foam over the balls there is puckering off to the sides.

Now you can pull and stretch on it as you are shaping the piece, but unfortunately, the bigger the breast you are trying to make, the more the foam will become distorted and the more puckering you will have to try to compensate for.  Now I think if you are an A,B, or C cup you will probably have no problem.  Heck even if you are a D or DD it might not be so bad, but if you are in the F or higher category like I am, it really does present quite a challenge.  We tried pulling as best we could, and then going back in with a heat gun to try to shape things out, but that really didn't work all that well.  After hours of aggravation, screaming, and frustration we finally just tried to pull as much of the distortion as we could off to the top 2 corners since those would get cut off anyways for the final piece.  It looked really funny at first, but after extensive cutting, heat gunning, and shaping we finally had something passable, and at this point I was more than happy to accept passable instead of trying to drive myself crazy going for perfect.  I failed to take any pictures at this stage as I was tired, but I will get some as we are detailing the piece.

So I know this was a long post, but all in all the part was very doable.  As soon as we switched to broil we got something decent looking on our first try, and if it wasn't for the aforementioned size problems  this would have been pretty quick.  So if you are trying to do this on your own, take heart, it probably won't be too bad, unless you have giant knockers, in which case you have my sympathy.  

Day 1: Male Breastplate & Gauntlet

Now that we have most of our supplies purchased we figured we would jump right into making the male breastplate.

We found these lovely templates online made by Julian Beek http://www.julianbeek.nl/blog/ for the Mass Effect 2 N7 armor.  I think I am gonna make something more similar to the Mass Effect 3 armor, but they do at least help us get a good idea of the general shape.

We own a projector, it's mounted in the ceiling of our garage (so my husband can project maps onto a table while playing Dungeons & Dragons, hahahaha, nerd....).  So we loaded the templates onto our computer and projected them onto some cardboard.

We cut out the cardboard and made sure it fit Trevor before cutting it out of foam.

Well.........  Here is where we made our first noob mistake.  We laid the cardboard pieces on the foam and traced them out and then cut them.  After laying them out I realized what we did wrong, and I felt REALLY stupid for it.  The foam has a cross hatch pattern on it.  We laid the neck and chest going in the same direction, but we laid the stomach going in a different direction to maximize the use of our foam.  Well even though I have never worked with foam I am very experienced with sewing and in sewing you always make sure that the grain of the fabric is always going in the same direction.  Basically if you cut one piece going one direction and the other piece going the other direction, then the direction of the cross-hatches won't match up and it will look a bit silly.  Not the end of the world, but still not as professional.  So yeah, we totally re-cut the offending piece.  Here is a pic from before we recut and you can see one is going up and down, and the other is diagonal.

So once we go the pieces cut out we used our projector to draw on the lines with a sharpie and then used the dremmel tool to add in the decorative channels.  We tried it with 2 different dremmel attachments, and OMG the flat disc shaped attachment works sooooo much better than the pointy conical attachment.

Then we used the dremmel to sand away some of the pieces, I have seen people online sand it away and it looks all nice and then they just paint it black, but ours did NOT look smooth and I didn't feel like taking the time to make it look smooth so we just got the cheap craft foam and just laid that in the space we had carved out and I am pretty please with how that turned out.

While my husband was working on the male breastplate I decided to get started on my gauntlets.  I need to figure out the size, so I just put it up on the projector and just kinda laid my arm out until it was the right size, hahahaha.  It came out a little small, I tried to compensate for the thickness of the foam, but I guess I did not compensate enough.....

So I don't have the industrial heat that most people use to shape their armor.  But I DO have a heat gun for embossing (like the kind you use when you do rubber stamping and add the embossing powder).  So I wanted to see if that would work, and it totally did!

So yeah, all in all, I think it was not a bad start for our first day!

Day 0 - Planning & Purchasing Supplies

My husband Trevor and I are going to attempt to make N7 Mass Effect Armor for this year's San Diego Comic-Con!!  While I have lots of arts and crafts experience, I have NEVER attempted anything like this and neither of us has ever worked with EVA foam, so this is going to be quite an adventure.  There are a lot of good blogs out there on the subject.  I will especially point out:

Evil Fx / BioWeapons http://bioweapons.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/mass-effect-n7-armor-build/
Volpin Props http://www.volpinprops.com/n7-armor-dragoncon-2010-recap/
Narayas / Julian Beek http://www.julianbeek.nl/blog/

But all of these great gentlemen all seem to have experience in the replica armor making field.  I am hoping this blog will be useful to show what triumphs and mistakes a couple of total noobs end up making.

So Day: 0 is basically shopping for supplies.  Pretty much everyone uses the interlocking foam EVA mats that you see in home gyms, day cares, ect...  A lot of people online mention it was cheaper to buy in person than online.  So I spent an epically long day driving around trying to find this stuff.  Home Depot has it online, so I went there and they DO NOT carry it in stores.  They suggested Big Lots, I went there, it IS cheapest there, but the wrong pattern.  I had a long day of fail, here is a recap:

Home Depot - N/A
Big Lots - Wrong Pattern
Kmart - N/A
Auto Zone - N/A
GTM - Rubber, not foam
Walmart - Wrong Pattern
Target - Correct Pattern! BUT crazy expensive $27 for only 4x 2'x2' mats
Big 5 Sporting Goods - Correct pattern, still expensive $24 for 4

I did some online searches of Sears, Lowes, Sports Authority, ect.... and I decided that buying it in person was not the way to go for me.  I live in San Diego, so maybe Southern California is more expensive?  Who knows?

So where did I end up going with?  I ordered from http://www.getrung.com/
Actually....they have a store through Amazon as well, so I ordered from there so we could use a gift card.  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_sporting-goods?_encoding=UTF8&field-brandtextbin=Get%20Rung&node=3375251

Get Rung seems to have very competitive prices, you can order as many as you need in sets of 6x 2' x 2' mats.  It's $15 for a 6 pack, so that certainly blows away the in-store prices I was seeing.  And my favorite part, they have COLORS!!!  I am going to make my FemShep armor in bright freaking purple, cuz well... that is the color of armor my FemShep wore!  I am lazy, so I am hoping ordering purple to begin with will save me a lot of painting time.  My husband Trevor is boring, so he got Grey.

So I am not 100% sure of the exact armor I want to create, a LOT of people online are doing the Mass Effect 2 armor, and I do like my ME2 Armor, and that's what all the online templates are for.  Here is mine:

But the ME3 armor is also really great, this one is the classic N7 set:

But I REALLY am digging the Hahne-Kedar Legs with the ME3 N7 torso.  I like how the Hahne-Kedar legs don't wrap around the back completely, which I think will allow for easier movement and sitting at Comic-Con.  Also I like how the piece that attaches at the waist does so with just some straps and pouches.  Which, OMG, pouches!  That sounds REALLY important since it will look REALLY stupid if I wear a purse with my space armor and I am going to need somewhere to store my wallet, lipstick, ect,...

Honestly I am not too fussy, whatever I make will probably be a bastardization combo of all three.

My husband is just going for the straight up classic grey N7, so I did not bother to take a picture of that.