Havoc Squad Trooper from scratch - In need of advice

[Invoco]

Greetings everyone,

I'm pulling this over from the rebel legion forums, since I'm impatient and the RPF seems more active


About a year ago I got into costume making as a hobby (see www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=274104 for my first build).
Now for this year, I'm planning to do a Havoc Trooper from scratch. After lots of research, I'm still somewhat undecided on how to approach this beast.




I was thinking about doing a full Pepakura build, but found only one set of files floating around - If I'm not mistaken, provided by rundown. However, these are a bit inaccurate from what I saw, and also incomplete since the lower arms (and maybe some other pieces) are missing.



My questions are now:
- Does anyone of you have a (full) set of pep files floating around and would be willing to share it? I'm not really good at sculpting by eye, so I would definitely prefer clear instructions, i.e. peping


- In case that thing gets too heavy after all the fiberglassing and putty and what not, does anyone of you have experience in turning pep+fiberglass armor into vac forming bucks? And, if so, what would you think the timeframe for that would be on top of the initial pepping? I found little info on that, but remember that I read about back-filling the fiberglassed stuff with plaster, which sounds reasonable for me.
Bear in mind, I have no experience in vac forming and would need to make a DIY vac former as well. Ok, I did a bit of vac forming before, but that was 12-15 years ago, and on a professional machine, so that doesn't really count I'm quick at learning techniques and crafty when I need to improvise, though - I had no experience at all before the Skyrim build and it still turned out quite ok I think. And sometimes I'm quite full of myself on top, so I think I could pull off the vac thing


And, as an added note: I don't want to buy a kit - that'd take the fun out of it for me


Thanks in advance

 

[Invoco]

Finally, some progress!

The last months have been pretty rough, but I managed to get some things done for this outfit.


But before really starting this project, I had to get a better working environment. So I built a proper workbench. I needed a larger area to work on and lots and lots of storage for materials and tools. This neat little thing here is 160cm wide, 60cm deep and about 90 high, so it sits at a comfortable height and provides a whole lot of drawers to store all my stuff away. This was my birthday present from me to me, and while not exactly cheap, only took me a few days to build. Funny enough, the most time went into waiting for the wood seal to dry.



I started with the helmet, since I (correctly?) assumed that this will be the most challenging part. I went with the Pepakura route, since everything else is beyond my skill level.


Here the pep is sitting on my mannequin instead of the Skyrim helmet. As you can see, it's warped, especially the lower respirator-like part. For the future, whenever I make a helmet, I'll probably modify the mesh so the visor is filled with paper for rectifying the shape. Anyway, I tried to work around it with some supports during the upcoming fiberglassing.

Turned out okay-ish I'd say, but a lot of body filler and sanding necessary...

After the first smoothing pass and some more resin for added strength, it got a bit thin in some spots.


This is already a bit of a fast-forward, after many many hours of body filler application, sanding, rinse and repeat, to rectify some of the apparent issues with symmetry and the like

And this is a major fast-forward... to the point where I just thought 'Meh. It's good enough now'.
I tried to get the symmetry as good as I could with what I had and modified the valley thingy in the mouth part to more closely resemble the reference pics. What you can't see here is that the visor is ready for mounting in this stage already. I used chicago screws that I epoxied to the inside. That alone caused quite a lot of grief and anger - In the first two attempts, they just went off after applying only so little force when screwing the visor in. I also managed to scratch the first visor I made in that process, so a new one was due... Then, in the final attempt, I milled out small recesses so the screws don't only stick to the surface, but the flat parts are also covered in epoxy glue. The issue was, that I had to mount them under the ridge in the lower part, where there's actually not too much material. However, thickening it up would lead to the visor being recessed by something like 2 cm, which isn't too appealing... So I ended up with quite a few holes there that I had to fix up again. Anyway, it seems to finally work now.



I applied a base coat of silver acrylic spray paint, hoping that it'll turn out to look a bit more like metal than plastic after final painting. I got an airbrush in the meanwhile, so let's see how that goes.

Electronics! I decided to modify the two extruded parts (I think the idea is to mount an oxygen supply or something there?). I milled them out so that the speakers for the electronics parts can sit there, and they fit quite well. Initially, I wanted to cover them in some kind of mesh, but I think their basic look fits the helmet quite well. The electronics are already finished, I just need to build some cases for the boards so they don't get damaged. In case you're interested, I followed the tutorial at http://tktalkie.com with a few modifications. Instead of using something like the Aker, I wanted compact speakers to sit right in the helmet. So I extended the basic kit with an audio amplifier (2 watts I think?) and hooked up two mini speakers. Despite their size, they pack quite a punch, but you can turn down the volume anyway. So what the kit does is the following: First, it has a voice modulation so it sounds a bit more like you're talking over intercom. Second, it adds static bursts when beginning/stopping to speak. And third, it allows you to play background intercom chatter from a wav file. All in all, pretty neat, and can be powered by a simple powerbank.
Second electronics part, also not pictured here: Fans. I guessed it'd get pretty hot in there, so I wired up two small 5V fans to USB cable that can also be plugged into a powerbank.


That's it for today, let's hope the best that the next update doesn't take as long as this one

 

[sdphmember001]

Hello Invoco, Great job, I'd love to see an update as a new member here. I have been mentally tinkering with the idea of building this armor after seeing "Hope" trailer again and I am curious to see your progress as inspiration! Thanks in advance.

 

[Invoco]

Hi,

Progress over the past half year stalled pretty hard due to... unforeseen stuff.

I don't have progress shots atm, mostly because I decided I wasn't too happy with the available pepakura files for the armor. Hence, I decided to remodel everything from scratch. I'm mostly done, gotta finish the thigh armor models and re-touch the knee and shin parts because I didn't like how the prototypes turned out. Nevertheless, the upper armor parts are done and I'm mostly pleased with the prototypes I got out for chest and the left arm parts. I might redo the forearm again to get closer to the trailer footage.
However, it's pretty cold here at this time of the year, so fiberglassing and bondo are pretty much impossible right now, since I'm working outside.