Skip to main content

Atlanta Cosplay Meetup: Group Build Update #3

It's been a while since we posted a progress report for the Atlanta Cosplay Meetup's ongoing project, and with Dragon Con right around the corner, we're nearing the finish line. Let's take a look and see what's been going on the last few months!



Check out our previous progress reports here:

Progress update #1

Progress update #2

Read on to see where we're at now...





During April and the early part of May, we finished fabrication of the masters for the Colonial Marine armor. Once again, fiberglass resin and bondo body filler was applied to the laser cut cardboard sculptures, which were progressively sanded down using finer and finer grit sandpapers until we were satisfied with the results.
 




The Pulse Rifle was also finished being mastered and prepped for molding. Normally for something of this size and shape, you would want a more complex molding technique, but time was a major limiting factor for us. Ultimately we went with building a large 2 part block mold out of a silicone rubber called Mold Max 30.




The rest of May was a huge jump in the amount of progress. We were in full production, casting and vacuumforming parts. The bulk of the Colonial Marines armor is vacuumformed, and Adam was hard at work on our vacuumforming machine. Some of the smaller parts were molded and we poured plaster vacuumforming masters (called "bucks"), but the chest and back were backfilled with plaster and used directly.





We assembly lined cutting out and cleaning up the vacuumformed and cast resin bits, cutting off the excess material (called "flashing") to get the part we need. They were then hit with a base coat of olive drab paint and set aside to dry, where we would then hand paint on the camo patterns.






 On the Xeno side of things, Valentin put together the final version of the tongue mechanism, and Kevin was hard at work on the skull sculpt. He covered the fiberglass and expanding foam cardboard with a sculpting clay, and was working on sculpting in details.





We were working hard up until the days before MomoCon, but unfortunately there was just too much to be done. There were also some unexpected issues with the Xeno skull sculpt that required us to effectively junk the master.




We did make it to MomoCon though and had a great time at our booth. We brought along the Pulse Rifle mold, and did an impromptu casting demo. Jonathan decided he wanted a golden Pulse Rifle, which we poured and demolded on camera.









After MomoCon we took a couple weeks break - everyone was exhausted and burnt out a bit! - before we got back into production mode. We have all of the vacuumformed parts made, so now it's a matter of casting up the remaining parts for the 11 sets of Marine armor. We're also putting the finishing touches on the paint for the armor sets - over 200 individual pieces!





The next few build days between now and Dragon Con will be fabricating the last few things needed, finalizing our painting, and strapping up armor sets. See you all at the hotel!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Capacitive-Touch Janko Keyboard: What I Did at the 2017 Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon

Last weekend (February 10-12, 2017) I made a Janko-layout capacitive-touch keyboard for the Moog Werkstatt at the Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon. The day after (Monday the 13th), I made this short video of the keyboard being played: "Capacitive Touch Janko Keyboard for Moog Werkstatt" (Text from the video doobly doo) This is a Janko-layout touch keyboard I made at the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech, February 10-12. I'm playing a few classic bass and melody lines from popular and classic tunes. I only have one octave (13 notes) connected so far. The capacitive touch sensors use MPR121 capacitive-touch chips, on breakout boards from Adafruit (Moog Hackathon sponsor Sparkfun makes a similar board for the same chip). The example code from Adafruit was modified to read four boards (using the Adafruit library and making four sensor objects and initializing each to one of the four I2C addresses is remarkably easy for anyone with moderate familiarity with C++), and

Freesiders Hackers Collaborate in Medical / Surgical Research

Published in the May issue of the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery : " A Novel Combination of Printed 3-Dimensional Anatomic Templates and Computer-assisted Surgical Simulation for Virtual Preoperative Planning in Charcot Foot Reconstruction ." This collaboration of specialties represents an undertaking by members of Freeside Atlanta , Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance , and The Podiatry Institute .  Charcot foot reconstruction remains on of the most challenging procedures in foot and ankle surgery.  These procedures are often lengthy procedures which can be riddled with complications. With the help of Freeside Atlanta Members, institutional researchers used open source Osirix Image viewer and 3D Software such as Newtek's Lightwave or Blender to create simulated surgical reductions as well as 3D printed templates.  Freeside Atlanta members assisted in providing 3D printing solutions and know-how to the project. Experimental test prints were done on a M

Onboard Firmware of the Human Brain

Freesiders are continually tinkering with robotics and other such machinery .  Many of these embedded processors and firmware are becoming open source and every-more diversified in the wake of the modern Maker movement . One notable boost to the hackerspace arsenal is the Arduino (an like platforms).  This offers designers an incredible power to devise not just individual devices but even the emergence of complex, integrated systems . This evolutionary pace of modern technological systems may be significantly faster the biologic system development, but there may be a few well learned tricks yet to be mastered.  It seems that studying how nature has managed to solve many development challenges will aid in designing robotics, where efficiently counts just as much. One  challenge, that is particularly interesting, is data processing.  Artificial intelligence is labored with processing data and producing a meaningful and useful output.  When considering the increase in sensory