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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Musical Intermission: Yoshida Brothers

Took a break from costuming (only mostly) yesterday to go see the Yoshida Brothers, a shamisen playing duo at Yoshi's jazz club in San Francisco. I found them by stumbling on this Youtube video some time ago. Then I heard that they were playing this week and figured they were worth seeing after listening to some of their other songs. They have some surprising influences in their songs, including blues and rock, for an instrument that sounds very traditionally Japanese. My current favorite songs of theirs are Storm (the song in the video above), Kodo, Rising and Indigo.

I'd never been to Yoshi's in SF before. The performance area was intimate and people were crammed in at small cocktail tables on several tiers. The sign outside said it can hold maybe 400 people, but it felt smaller than that. Last night, the brothers were accompanied by a really good drummer using a wide variety of percussion instruments from snares and cymbals to bongos and what looked like a set of chimes. Clearly they'd been working with him before because their point-counterpoint exchanges sounded dead on even with their complex syncopation. Everything in the performance seemed very exacting, even down to the timing and shape of the lighting that went with the music. Watching them play, their fingers flying over the three strings, made my fingers hurt. Afterwards, they were available for CD signing so we added their Best of CD to our collection.

I have a feeling I'll be sewing to the sounds of shamisen in the next couple of weeks.

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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.

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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.

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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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