The Finished Costume

So now to the big reveal! The finished costume took several days to complete start to finish but  you have to agree it doesn't look too bad. The gun is a toy that I also painted up.

Costume Build part II

So this is the first helmet design fibreglassed and painted, with the fibreglass layer it became way too tight to wear so I had to redesign the whole helmet.

 Here's the new design helmet glued together.

 As you can see I've begun fibreglassing the inside of this one.

 Once its hardened I give it a base coat of black spray paint.

 Heres the previous two, the resin shrank the helmets size too much and it became way too tight.

The next stage was to fibreglass the body armour add some LED lights and spray paint it all.

Costume Build part I

1. After printing from Pepakura I cut all the pieces scored and folded them ready to hot glue in place.

2.All the pieces secured etc.

3. Cut fibreglass tissue into strips for easy application.

4. Also cut some fibreglass matt for extra strength.

5. Mix a cup of Jesmonite Resin, place the matt and tissue into the helmet and brush over it with resin.

Backplate

Front plate

Dropship Rigged

So I've rigged the dropship using some bones and set driven keys I watched a great tutorial on set driven keys by Eric at Fresh Maya.com. The tutorial is available here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRhCL4B-h5E

I just need to texture this and its done for Edward to get started on.

Dropship Block modelling

So to keep myself extra busy I started blocking out the dropship here's the basic blockiness and then a more detailed version, most details are going to be added in via texture and normal maps.

Opening shot

So after a production meeting a few weeks back, I asked Gergo and James to whip me up a destroyed cityscape to fly the dropship through. They've delivered... below is the mock up Gergo quickly made to test the colour and lighting and below that the finished background plate. Gergo composited James' destroyed buildings into the shot. The next stage is for me to projection map it so Edward can animate the dropship.

Test Shot - Original plate

 Test shot - Composite

Final backplate

Complete with animated smoke and fire. Great job.

Storyboarding

I began working on the story boarding for the short and I am going to share a few frames here. It should all be finished by Friday but here's a few shots.

Costume design

After writing the scriptment for this short I was keen to begin work on the costumes, I knew that these would take some time to put together so i modelled the helmets from scratch in Maya and exported them to a software package called Pepakura designer. This program allowed me to uv the helmet and then print it on card. The plan was to then fibreglass and resin the card stock and then build up the details and smoothness with bondo, (a polyester putty.) In the end I ended up redesigning the helmet a few times. The first image is the first design followed by the final design and the design in Pepakura.

As you can see in Pepakura the sections of the model are cut and flattened across several A4 sheets, each section is printed with tabs and edge identifiers to help attach them.

As with all prop building there are many other methods out there. If I had all the required equipment and time I would have preferred to try sculpting the helmets in clay and using that to create a cast. Doing it that way would have meant several helmets could be cast identically and quickly while the Pepakura route means each helmet has to be hand made.