Progress Report

Chest Plate - 100% cut
Center Equipment Plate - 100% cut
Shin/Calf Assembly - 80% cut

Total amount of time spent on project: 20 hours

Wanna make armor? Take note:

I'm not entirely sure how many individual parts the entire suit has, but I do know that there's over 100 pages of them. If you're going to do a project like this, I strongly recommend that you do a few things. One, plan your build from start to finish. Know what you need to do first, what you need to get started, and don't get started until you have all of your materials and tools; it's too easy to grind to a halt because you don't have something and then not start up again. Two, have an effective system for organizing parts. My parts are organized into folders, one per armor component. The folders are further organized into three files: lower body, upper body, and helmet. Three, pick something without too many parts to start with. I began with the shin, which is 9 pages long and annoyingly complex in places. It's all well and good to want to start up your project, but if you wanted to make (for example) the helmet I'm using, you'd be cutting, folding, and glueing 19 full pages of parts, most of which are tiny and complex. That's a really easy way to lose motivation on the project, because you think the rest of it will be that tedious and time-consuming.

To give you an idea of how long that 9-page shin is taking me, I've currently been working for 12 hours overall, 8 of which have been spent on cutting out the shin pieces, which are about 80% complete. If I figure, say...10 hours for the entire cutting process, with perhaps 4 to score the fold lines on everything, and another 3 to glue it together, we're talking about 17 hours of work. Not 17 hours of working and dicking around on youtube/eating/whatever the hell else you do to kill time, 17 hours of solid work. Double that for two shins, at 18 pages of work. 34 hours have theoretically gone into covering your body from your ankles to below your knees. The helmet, at 19 pages, may take longer than that.

My recommendation? To start out, print a single knee plate. It's 4 parts in total, all fit onto one page. Assembling it will give you a good idea of the skills you'll be building, and how things fit together in general.

There's a couple other things you're going to need. Figure out exactly what tools you're going to be using, and make sure that they're sharp or functional. Plastic craft scissors aren't going to cut, and neither are dull Exacto blades. Be mature about the entire project. Don't be stupid and decide that your armor is going to have a functional HUD, stop bullets, and make you crap rainbows, especially not when you haven't even made your first cut. It's ok to plan out a cool feature in advance, in fact, you should, but be realistic. For example, I plan to construct a variable-tint visor for my helmet, and I know exactly what parts I need to do so. If you have an "awesome" idea, don't even consider it unless you know how to do it or can learn easily. For example, on the 405th forums, there was a post referencing a home-made liquid cooling vest. The poster claimed to have designed everything (meaning he just photoshopped some aquarium tubing onto a vest), but he was just missing one part: a small, powerful pump to move water through the system. Well, it soon emerged that he had also forgotten to figure out exactly HOW the water was supposed to be cooled off prior to entering the system, there was no form of refrigerant or heat exchanger. What started as a fun idea quickly became a poorly thought-out pipe dream.

Finally, I encourage anyone who reads this to go out and build your costume, whether ODST or not. You can't build any experience without doing so, and it's extremely cheap to do, on the order of about 11 dollars at the moment.

I've got that shin-king feeling...

So today I managed to crack out the mat cutter, which drastically speeds up the process of cutting the parts. I'm probably working about 4-5 times faster than I was, but it took me 4 hours to cut 1/3 of the parts of one shin and calf. Luckily, I think that the cutting (and then scoring the fold lines) is going to be the most laborious part of the entire project, but we'll see. The shin model that I'm building has 9 pages of parts, making it the third most complex piece I have to build, only the thighs/torso (tied at 12 pages) and the helmet (19 pages) beat them out, so the rest of the armor should go by faster. No photos from the mat cutter today, but the picture is of my "detail workspace," where I use Exacto knives and razor blades to carefully ensure each piece is perfect.

In other news, I finished printing every component that I need to build in order to determine the proper sizing of the final product. This equals 73 pages of parts to build 12 components out of the 20 that make up the entire ensemble. I tried tweaking the sizes in the pepakura program of a couple items (including the torso and helmet), because those items are large and complex enough that I'd prefer to get the size perfect the first time. I may pick up working again later tonight, but probably not, it's been a long day with over 7 hours of work put in on the project.

Officially started

Yesterday I printed an entire shin and knee, with the intent to quickly and easily pep (pepakura) it. I rapidly determined that cutting out all of the individual details by hand with a razor blade and a straight-edge was not going to be particularly speedy. Crap. Luckily for me, I have access to a professional-grade mat-cutting machine, which will hopefully drastically speed up this process. I'll see about getting photos out later on.

By the way, I won't be posting either the files that I used or links to them in this blog. Every one of these files was produced by minds much more talented than mine, and I take absolutely no credit for anything except assembling them. If you want the files, you can go look through the forums on 405th.com and find them yourself, just as I did. Consider it a test of dedication: if you're willing to put down the effort to find all of the files (which was simple but time-consuming), you're more likely to put down effort on the project.

Introduction

Well, I'll freely admit to being a huge fan of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers of the Halo universe. I've loved them since they were mentioned in The Flood, and when I heard that a game was being made entirely around ODSTs, I practically crapped myself with excitement. I began thinking about building a costume, but sadly, my artistic talents don't extend much further than a flair for explosions, firearms, and similarly destructive pursuits.

Recently, however, I discovered Pepakura and more importantly, 405th.com, an online resource for Halo costuming enthusiasts. Pepakura essentially amounts to taking a 3d computer model and unfolding it into flat panels that can be printed onto paper (I use 110-lb. cardstock). These panels are then cut out and folded according to lines printed on them, at what point you glue them together and produce the original model in paper. The level of detail that can be produced in this manner is truly amazing, and I encourage you to browse the forums on 405th.com to see some of the results.

Over the course of about two weeks, I slowly collected the best files I could find for each component of the Halo 3: ODST armor, and decided to begin the project when I went home over my winter break. I've broken it down into a few basic steps, which I'll now outline:

1. build a single piece of each component and try them on to determine the proper scale
2. build the properly scaled components
3. use fiberglass resin to coat the paper models, hardening them for the next step
4. use overlapping strips of fiberglass cloth (think paper-mache) to reinforce the inside of the pieces, wetting them with industrial-strength epoxy to produce components that are essentially glass-reinforced plastic (which is insanely tough and hard wearing, not fragile at all)
5. pad the inside of the components with dense foam and attach the straps
6. build my undersuit
7. paint the armor
8. wear the armor

obviously, this is a pretty simplified overview of what needs to be done, and my master plan is much more detailed. I plan to document as much of the process as I can on this blog. My original intent was to build an exact replica of Dutch's armor from the game, but I think now I'll do my own color scheme/unique parts. More later!

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