Chris posted his Tali props video so here it is, as promised!
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Garrus: The Making Of
Chris posted his making-of-video a few days ago. He's made some minor improvements to Garrus, primarily in the comfort of his shoes.
I made a cleaner set of Tali belt buckles, which sadly didn't make it into any decent full body picture shots from Halloween so I'll post them on their own. I also tried to improve the shape of my boots by caving in the calf portion to try and streamline them a bit more. Not so sure I was totally successful.
I'll post Chris' Tali props video when he has it up.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Post PAX + Press
We're back from PAX and still absorbing all the awesomeness of the experience. Friday was our Normandy crew day when we got a taste of traffic-stopping fame. We didn't get to the convention center until 4pm after getting ourselves outfitted up. We deliberately got a late start to the day because Chris and I didn't know how long we would last in our costumes and we knew we wanted to catch up with fellow Mass Effect cosplayer and awesome all-around girl, Holly Conrad at her evening PAX panel, From CG to Reality.
Little did we realize that as soon as we rounded the corner towards the last two blocks on the approach to PAX that our progress would be severely impeded by picture posing. Every few feet or so, we would be stopped by people wanting to take pictures of us or with us. Luckily, it was pretty easy to just ask the people asking for our pictures where Holly was and where the Bioware booth was. It just took a really long time to get there. We could only really move forward when security would tell us that we would need to keep moving to prevent blocking up the aisles. Then we would move another few steps and start it all over again.
The picture above was taken at the Bioware booth. We were a bit anachronistic standing in front of a huge poster of their fantasy game rather than Mass Effect, but we were loved up with flash photography all the same.
I didn't actually see much of PAX until Saturday when I had no helmet on my head. Chris switched to his Daft Punk (below) costume where he was wearing a helmet. He got stopped for plenty of pictures and interviews but we could still walk around and see the booths we wanted to see.
We're still looking for pictures and Chris' aforementioned interviews so if anyone's got links, please let me know!
Now for the pictures that we did find. I think my favorite mention of us came from Joystiq.com where they used our picture to lead the article and wrote that we were "quite possibly the best Tali and Garrus we've ever seen". Yay us!
We were included in Kotaku's gallery (picture 17).
Game Informer also had us in their gallery of PAX
About 56s into this video Daft Punk makes an appearance.
And then a random video where I desperately dodge the camera.
Saturday night, we had a blast attending the Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton concert. On Sunday we unexpectedly ran into them at their merchandise booth so I got Jonathan Coulton to sign my pass.
We had so much fun! I have some repairs to make on the costume and perhaps some redesign, but I'll give myself a week or so of down time before I tackle those so long as they're in time for Halloween.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Full Mass Effect
Did a full dress rehearsal yesterday and recruited our friends Kati and Eric as our photographers. I jammed out some pretty late nights this past week trying to get all the accessories I needed, but failed to get the boot knife in before our photo shoot.
Of course, there's lights on everyone's costumes and we had to defend a dark lab from danger just to see it.
I have some fixes to do to the various attachments: hood keeps falling off from the wind, my leg and arm bands don't stay where I want them to. Nothing a liberal use of velcro can't fix. Chris and Lee have various cracks in their armor that needs patching up, but overall I think we're ready to hit the road with this Normandy crew.
I'll leave you with some photoshopping in honor of the Penny Arcade Expo we're going to. The original comic was from Penny Arcade.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Head, Hand, Legs and Feet
Shepard first: Lee is almost done with his costume. Had a mild setback on schedule due to some mysterious illness, but he's feeling better now (and playing Borderlands) so he'll be back to finishing up the arm stripe tomorrow. His costume saga hasn't changed from the dremel and paint routine for a bit, but the details are really coming out nicely.
Chris is a genius. He finished my Tali helmet and the Omni-tool. It looks like I'm wearing a hologram in that shot. The helmet is the aforementioned vacuum-formed dome with purple tint and Nite Shades black spray to pull it darker. The frame is made of some more bent plastic (PET-G), EVA foam. We put a brimless baseball cap inside so that I can actually wear the thing. He's also built in a voice-activated mouth light and some UV LEDs in the hopes that the UV contacts I bought will glow inside the helmet.
The Omni-tool is a thing of beauty made of the same plastic, some mylar sheeting, rivets, bits of a keyboard's circuitry pattern and a bunch of tiny amber LEDs meticulously wired together.
Lest it sound like I'm not doing any work on my own costume, I've finished my Tali jacket and hood with the exception of a couple of snaps to attach the body scarves to my leg bands and belt attachment points. And the thing the holds my hood closed. The Tali boots above are made of shoes (they're in there, I promise) that aren't terribly comfortable, some upholstery foam to shape the toes, black Duck tape, and EVA foam. Ahh foam, is there anything you can't do?
I'm almost done with sewing. Just some gloves and a neck bib for the hood I'm wearing under the helmet. Then it's belts, arm packs and boot knife.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Tali Helmet
Chris is making my helmet since he's got bandwidth, being finished with his Garrus costume and all. I made a model of what would fit around my head in Tali helmet fashion out of armature wire, wire mesh and a couple layers of duct tape on the outside. Then he filled it in with three layers of plaster, two on the inside, one on the outside and sanded the heck out of the outside to smooth it. Naturally, that required some Bondo to fill in a gaping chasm of an air bubble and we ended up with a Rorschach-looking helmet model. 
Took some PETG plastic, vacuum-formed six or so helmet candidates, one of which will be the lucky recipient of paint, sanding, painted helmet frame, and overall Tali awesomeness. The picture below actually has the clear plastic over the mold, but it's a bit hard to see.
I keep forgetting to take a picture of the more finished version of the helmet at work, but I'll update that as soon as I remember. As for me, I'm working on my Tali legs. I have my squishy foam Tali toes and tonight will hopefully be making my boots.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Shepard Armor Update
Lee has all of his main armor pieces formed and is moving onto detail work. The picture above is before doing some size adjustments and strapping everything together.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Garrus Complete
Chris did a full costume test over the weekend and I was there to take the pictures. Needed to take video to show off his armor and gun lighting. Very stealthy for a sniper. Or not.
Clearly I've got some work to do to measure up to this level of workmanship.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Tali Bodysuit Evolution
From right to left, Tali's bodysuit evolved from paper tracing pattern, to practice suit (aka Christmas Tali) #1 which received hexagon treatment and ripped apart again, practice suit #2 with improved fit and finally the actual Tali bodysuit.
This isn't my first bodysuit project. This was:
There were improvements I wanted to make from the Harley bodysuit (better fit through the butt/crotch area) and obviously I needed to change up the fabrics and fabric division to become Tali'Zorah.
I've already previewed the hexagons painted on matte stretch vinyl fabric. I found the other fabric at my local fabric store for her hood/jacket.
Things I learned about the Tali bodysuit:
- Stretch vinyl has a high spring force. Its stretch characteristic is similar to the red Harley fabric from a pure length dimension but the amount of force it takes to get it to stretch the same amount is easily quadrupled. As a result, getting the suit on up to my knees requires some warm ups and calisthenics in addition to taking a break between each leg for endurance. I will be adjusting the assumed stretch for the jacket sleeves accordingly.
- The master pattern is drawn for the whole bodysuit. I subdivided for the fabric on the same master and traced off of it for each fabric type. Having the master pattern intact allowed me to adjust the pattern without having to recreate it every time.
- The seam allowance edges on each fabric creates a huge mismatch between edge lengths particularly through the U shapes on the legs and back. This made the U shapes very fiddly to sew. Thankfully both fabrics are stretchy and accommodated the mismatch.
- The zipper is only attached to one type of fabric instead of bridging the gap to both. This let me install the zipper onto the lycra fabric before attaching the whole assembly to the vinyl. Once I was working with the hexagoned vinyl fabric, I wanted do that attachment only once because any seam ripping on the stretch vinyl would show the holes made by the sewing needle. It came in handy because I did manage to mess up the zipper attachment the first time around.
Things I like about the Tali bodysuit:
- I'm happy with the fit through butt/crotch region. I even made sure to match up the hexagon across the seam. The saddle design seems to help with this fit. I used a pair of bike pants to model the flat pattern shape for it.
- The pre-work with the hexagon test suit paid off. The hexagons are largely vertical even through the back curvy bits.
Things I don't like about the Tali bodysuit:
- I messed up the zipper fit through my upper back. I think it's because the pattern was originally designed to include sleeves which would provide tension across the upper back and not allow it to bunch up. I've rationalized this away because that portion should be hidden underneath the Tali jacket. (And I'm not doing the hexagon fabric again)
- I messed up on the collar. Again, this should be hidden underneath the Tali jacket so I'm not going to fix it.
On to the Tali jacket + hood.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Hexagons, EVA Foam and Garrus
Mass Effect 2 costuming update:
Matte 4-way stretch vinyl with painted hexagons for Tali's bodysuit. It was really hard to find a fabric with elongated hexagons so I decided to paint them on myself thinking that a pattern of hexagons with a stencil shouldn't be too bad especially if I cut the fabric first before adding the pattern. Turns out, the pattern isn't too regular due to the fit especially on the backside. The full pattern ended up being drawn 3 times: once on the test suit, once in chalk on the vinyl, and again in paint. Take a guess on how many hexagons there are (partial hexagons count).
Lee is building his armor out of EVA foam, the same stuff used for padded flooring in some gyms and garages. Luckily for him, someone else has been building very impressive male and female version of Commander Shepard armor.
Chris is mostly done with his costume. He's even got Garrus' sniper rifle done. I can't do justice to his process. Roughly, it involves armature wire, wire mesh, upholstery foam, carbon fiber upholstery fabric, fiberglass bonding resin, Mod Podge, plaster, craft foam, a lot of sanding, painting and offensive amounts of hot glue (his words). He's got a lot more pictures on his Flickr page.
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