Half-Life - Gordon Freeman - WIP

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Gordon Freeman

I figured out a good way to get this made. First making a temporary armor out of cardboard to get the shape right, cardboard is cheap easy to work with too, so the shape turned out good. After that I will reinforce the inside with poliester in fiberglass, remove the cardboard, finish it with more fiberglass and smooth it all out with bondo.

Here is the finished cardboard shape of the chest armor.

I found that the best and maybe the only possible way of wearing this is to split the top black area in half and have it hinged at the sides, then lock it with hidden locks on the front and back.

 

[ItsThatGuy]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

That's going to look fantastic, I am sure. :thumbsup Great start.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Thanks
It will be metallic orange and shiny:love

When it's finished, I want to take photos that follow the storyline of the game, so will just add more and more fake battle dammage and weathering with silver foil and water-paint, so I will build it to look new and undamaged.

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

That looks fantastic! You're making me jealous. I'm using pepakura to make my HL2 HEV suit and everything keeps going wrong. It feels like it actually would be easier at this point to sculpt the torso from scratch than use these horribly warping suppport-strut-less pepakura models. It's funny that you update this now, I'll be starting up my build thread within the month. Looking forward to your progress. (I have a fun picture in mind for mine, luckily it's a lot easier.)

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Thanks, I'm glad you like it, even in a crappy cardboard state
I did some fiddling with the pepakura model of the mark V myself, but in the end I figured that since that didn't work well and the mark IV is different in every detail, I might as well just make the whole shape from scratch myself. I'll keep the photos coming. Good luck with your build then:thumbsup

 

[Bowelrock]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Ed Big Dady Roth used a similar process when he built all his cars.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

That's good, then I know this method should work then.
I've started fiberglassing all the parts now, and will soon be finished with that.
Now I just need some hinges and spray paint.

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

If you find good colors of paint let me know. I don't have access to an airbrush, so I need to find spray cans for light orange, dark orange, grey, black, and dark metallic. The black is pretty easy, the grey is going to be Tamiya clear grey over the light orange (it's just for one particular spot on the HL2 suit) and the metallic and two shades of orange are obvious.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

I will use spray cans too, but that works well enough for me. I think if I buy spray paint here, it will just be some local made stuff to this country that you can't find elsewhere, like the dark orange paint I already bought. But if I find a good metallic orange spray paint from a brand that's everywhere, then I'll let you know the name.

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

I don't have a problem with the quality of spray cans, just the color selection. The only way I know of to get the light orange here is to go to a local paint store and pay $30 a can for a custom mix.

 

[punisher]

Re: Gordon Freeman

The look of him there from the second game always made me wonder how he got a haircut on a tram in the middle of space :confused Oh well, at least I won't have to cut mine so it won't fit my other costumes.

With a crowbar duh!

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

The G-man used to be in a fraternity and shaved his head while he was asleep. He's lucky he didn't wake up with anything on is forehead.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Well the Norwegian winter is here with cold, snow, more cold, and more snow. Resin work can not continue indoors without becoming loopy in brain. :wacko

On the other hand I would like to tell about something absolutely awesome that will help me A LOT once this costume is finished; I kept wondering about how the hell I would get decent photos of this costume when Gordon Freeman was usually running around in secret highly-technological locations and even space far far away, then thought that I probably had to drive around in this costume and ask factories if I could run around with shotguns in there while taking photos. :confused

But as it turns out there are a group of people that started as early as 2004 to create a new and improved version of the first Half-Life game based on the source engine used for Half-Life 2. Those of you who have played Half-Life 2 probably know that the graphics look pretty much real, so this means that the new version of Half-Life called Black Mesa will look just as real!!

So when this game gets released, and even for free, then I can take realistic background screenshots of all the awesome locations in Half-Life and use them for my costume. All the areas are even awesomely improved and full of zombies and aliens that look real too, and maybe it is even possible to play this new game through "Garry's Mod" which means that I can take photos anywhere from any angle and place aliens here and there in poses that I can choose myself, place corpses around, blood spills, weapons, you name it..

And that is so absolutely awesome for this costume!!

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Not much of an update, but perhaps all the hardcore Half-Life fans out there will get a tingly feeling in their pants when they see "Gordon Freeman's super-power nerd glasses!"

Soon the snow should be gone too, so I will finally get to work on the HEV armor again, which I hope will look "movie quality" when it's done. So far all other HEV's have been either cardboard or plastic sheets, most often held together with duct tape.

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Nicely done, I was thinking of doing the same with my Who glasses, but decided I'd rather just carve new ones out of horn plates.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

A small update about this costume, or rather a different version of the costume.

I always wanted to have photos of this costume at every event in the game, and fortunately for me there will be a new version of Half-Life out there soon called Black Mesa which looks really great and will give me plenty of realistic background photos. I thought that since a large enough portion of the game's beginning had him walking around in his work clothes, I would also have to have these clothes in order to fill in the whole story with my photos, so I decided to order a lab coat and shoes online and bought some really cheap clothes elsewhere.

Today I got the lab coat in the mail and decided to take a few photos of the costume so far now that I have the beard again too. The shoes should arrive soon also.

I could only find a shirt of the size XXL, so it is pretty large around the collar, making my head look smaller... So I will alter the size and things on some of the clothes soon. The tie was already altered to make some small white stripes red instead.

It was all based on this:

 

[Risu]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

For a long time now I've wanted to get a group of people together to take that photo from HL2. I could pull off Freeman if I grew the beard and I have a friend that looks exactly like Vance, then we'd just have to find some others to match the rest.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Yeah you should do that, the original photo texture is like 150 pixels wide.

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

Alright, started working on the HEV again, done with all the panels for the main torso.
So far there seems to be about 8 models or something of the HEV, one being from the first demo, second demo, game, second game, HD of that, HD of that again, and so on... I've decided to make the abdominal section as the ribbed rubber version from the HD model, because having hard armor there will make it nearly impossible to move, plus the ribbed rubber section will match the other joint sections.

Can probably post some photos of it all soon, though it is all made in a strange way since they don't really sell anything good here to make stuff with...

 

[Jehudah Design]

Re: Half-Life - Gordon Freeman

I searched the web quite a lot to find some good shoes for this costume, and these were the closest I could find to the game model shoes -

Pretty darn good shoes too for a really low price, even has gold soles inside and that nice "new leather shoes smell"

Also I am adding photos to my buildup page for the HEV suit, located here - The Creation Of The Hazard Suit.
Stay tuned if the link doesn't work right now.