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.