JD Builds: Protoman Cosplay Writeup

First post on this blog! Alright! For This project I wanted to make myself a video game accurate Protoman cosplay to go along with some of my cosplay group's Megaman plans.

Helmet

I've made a couple other helmets in the past using the popular Pepakura method so I started from there. The design of Protoman's helmet is simple enough, a sphere, two ears, cutting out the face, and adding a crest. I spent a night or two designing a file in 3DSMax to plug into pepakura and another few nights watching youtube and sorting polygons in pepakura in order to efficiently assemble the helmet. The crest is a seperate piece since, when working on previous helmets, I know how much of a pain it is to sand around raised parts like that. So I'll sand each part individually later before attaching the two.

Once I had my files ready I printed it out, a few pages at a time. I printed out the supporting pieces onto cardstock first in order to establish a scale. I've found that somewhere around 250 mm in height is a good size to start finding your scale with. It's incredibly important when working in Pepakura that your scale is correct early on, especially if you're making a helmet with an open face. Your helmets should fit snugly but shouldn't flex when being put on. I never crease my edges unless it's a hard turn, this allows the cardstock to bend naturally and form the curves of the sphere for me.

I was content with how this helmet was worn, being my 3rd attempt at scaling it, bringing it up a 10% scale increase from my previous attempt I moved on to the fiberglass stage.

One coat of bondo fiberglass resin (you can find this in the automotive section at Walmart) and there are small indentations in the cardstock from brush strokes. That's OK though, my goal with the first 2-3 coats is to get it to retain it's general shape so I can cut out the supporting pieces. Once those are cut out I use a heatgun to undo any accidental dents and apply a heavy coat to the inside of helmet to solidify the shape. I don't worry about sanding off nublets of resin until the helmet is nice and rigid, the last thing I want to do is sand away the cardstock on accident with powered sanders.

In this case, once I cut out the supporting pieces and tried the helmet on I wasn't content with the shape of one of the ears. Sometimes the fiberglass resin can undo the bonds made with hotglue and will make the helmet solidify in the wrong position. The helmet was also slightly deformed because the supporting pieces didn't hold the helmet in the proper position.So I went back a few steps and redesigned the helmet with better supporting pieces, thicker edges, and adjusted how my pepakura file constructed the ears. Since I had to reprint a new file anyways I adjust the scale ever so slightly so that it fit PERFECTLY.

The face of a professional.

When placed side by side it's easier to tell the differences between the two helmets, I liked the thicker edges that the Viewtiful Joe helmet I was working on at the same time so I decided to put them on Protoman too and I think the results speak for themselves.

Once I sped through the fiberglass steps again and sanded off the nublets of left over resin, my next goal was to hide the seams between the polygons using Bonbo Body Filler. Something like $10 in the automotive section and it's such a nice way to get rid of these ugly looking poly gons. You mix up about a golf ball size of the stuff at a time and spread it on uneven surfaces, it takes only a few minutes for it to start getting stiff so I keep smoothing it out until it's hard to move, then I mix more and do another section.

The filler leaves behind it's only little nublets of material, but the stuff sands quite easily. When sanding always start with a large grit sand paper then work your way down. For this I start with 50 grit and sand with powered square sander until mostly smooth.

Notice the edges of the polygons are seen but the faces are not? That's because the edges are higher up than the faces in the total spherical shape. The filler gets added to the face of the polygons to fill out the intended shape. You just have to be careful not to accidentally fill in hard turns.

Once it's sanded I paint it with a black primer in order to spot blemishes easier, then I reapply bondo filler to them and any flat looking area, sand, paint, repeat. I do most of the sanding at this point by hand to ensure that I don't sand blemishes into the material.

The helmet looked pretty smooth before but now that it's painted you can really see all the scratches marring the surface.

It's a vicious cycle of OCD now, I fill, sand, paint several times until it's perfectly smooth. At the later stages of the filling and sanding process I stop using Bondo Body Filler and use Bondo Glazing and Spot Putty, it comes in a toothpaste tube in the automotive section and is ready to sand in a few minutes, can be spread with your finger and is even easier to smooth out than the body filler. I like to use it for the tiny pock marks and scratches. It's also fills cracks fairly nicely, just make sure not to use it anywhere that's going to flex or it will crack again. (for those types of cracks I suggest filling with a small amount of apoxie sculpt). I fill with the Spot Putty and sand with finer and finer sand paper until I'm sanding with nothing but extra fine 220 grit sand paper and I'm struggling to find blemishes in the helmet.

Now that I've got a perfectly smooth shape I can attach the crest to the helmet. I hot glue it on intially and then use body filler to fill in the gaps. Sand it down, and basically repeat my previous steps on the areas around the crest. This is my first time making the detailed portions of my helmets separate pieces and I think it might be my new protocol from now on because it came out so well that I wish I had done the same with the ears.

Now the helmet is ready for paint.

Proto Buster

Next up is the Buster Arm. pretty much the same process as the helmet. Create a 3D model, measured to secure around my upper arm, then arrange it in a Pepakura file.

In hind sight when designing this file, the barrel of the buster should've been made a separate piece so that it could've been sanded smooth easier.

After a few nights designing and trying to get the scale right I printed it out and folded it.

Since the supporting pieces on this one were much smaller and only affected the shape of the arm hole, I went heavy on the fiberglass early. I spread it out quite well so it only needed a few rounds of the body filler/sand cycle before I was happy with it. I hot glued a dowel inside it vertically in order to have something to hold onto, though the opening, once padded, holds onto my arm like a vacuum so it may not have been necessary. A few rounds of paint and fill with the spot putty and fine grit sand paper, and the buster is also ready for paint.


Compare the smoothness of the body section to the smoothness of the nozzle, you can see a distinct difference in how easy the two areas are too sand.

Boots and "Popeye Arm"

The separate arm and legs of Proto man were made from EVA foam, or "Puzzle Matt" foam.

I took some measurements around my arms, and legs in order to determine the size and scale needed before designing the 3D files. I kept the shapes as simple as possible so when plugged into pepakura the polygons would lay flat, then I could print out several pages at a time, glue all the pages together, and then cut out the pattern which would be transfered over to the eva foam, leaving only one seam to hotglue.

The shoes of the boots were made by hand by using an old pair of sneakers and adding foam around them. The shoes I wanted to remain rather flexible since I would be walking in them all day so I sent these straight to the paint step.

The arm however had to be as near to identical in material as the buster arm since canonicallly the Mega and Proto busters transform around their hands. The arm I made of EVA foam in 3 separate pieces, once the separate pieces were cut out and glued into their rings the inside edges were sanded flat in order to glue the 3 rings together. The end result looks rather polygonal but the proportions looked right compared to the buster arm, which is bigger than the normal arm in most reference pictures.

In order to round it out I first put a coat of fiberglass on the outside of the arm and then sanded it down, and applied body filler/spot putty to also hide the hot glue seams. a few coats and sanding cycles later and the arm looks fantastic.

First coat of fiberglass


The Polygonal look is mostly gone and the seams have disappeared thanks to the filling and fiberglassing treatment

Shield

Last up props wise was the shield. I scratched my head for weaks on how to tackle it. It was far too big to handle with pepakura, the amount of polygons it would take to get that rounded shape would have me sorting my pepakura file for weeks. So I browsed my Lowes for ideas, I needed a sheet of something flexible that I could somehow get to retain itself when curved it. What I got was a $12 sheet of plastic, the type they use for fluorescent light fixtures, the back side was textured but the front was smooth.

I created another pattern in pepakura like with the boots and arms as a flat oval ring that represented the raised edges of Protoman's shield. I traced it onto the material and cut out the shape. Then I flexed it to the shape I wanted and measured the width it would be. Using that measurement I cut a PVC pipe that width and hotglued it in the center of both edges. I applied a VERY heavy coat of fiberglass on the textured backside, then using Fiberglass cloth with it, a second heavy coat, then a third heavy coat. I cut off the PVC pipe and the shield kept it's taco like properties.

Reusing my pattern and anothe sheet of the plastic I cut out the ring and glued it to the surface for the raised edges. I also cut out the windowed portion with my dremil's cutting wheel and inset it by adding some scrap plastic and card stock, fiberglassing again to make it solid. Another piece of plastic for the raised edge around the window and the gist of the shield is done.

On a side note this plastic material cracks quite easily you can see around the ring portion of the shield a red crack I had to place there in order to get it to lie flat, nothing a little bit of filler and sanding can't fix, but something to keep in mind for future projects.

Once the intial shape was set out I painted it with some black primer in order to pick out whatever blemishes were around, spot putty/sanded them and moved on to paint.

Paint

Paint was a deadline fiasco, I had done all the red leading into my final day of production. Knowing I had to go to my day job Thursday night I stayed up all night wednesday and into Thursday morning painting so I could go to work in the evening and immediately fall asleep when I got home. But around 2 hours before work I removed the materials I was using the mask with, painters tape and Walmart bags for the big areas, and the Florida heat fused the materials into the already dried paint and left behind an ugly looking texture, pieces of plastic bags, and even the text on the plastic bags.

This required me to start over, I had to resand the sticky paint which was nearly impossible to get back to it's original, perfectly smooth shape and then I had to repaint it. I didn't have time to spend masking and spraying anymore so instead of spray painting it all like I normally do I instead spray painted only the red, since it's the majority of the helmet and the arms, legs and shield weren't affected by it. Everything else was hand painted thanks to the help of my very supporting mother while I was at work which enabled me to catch up on my sleep. The edges of the paint aren't as crisp as I would like and some of the details were ruined by having to resand but I got them done in time to attend the con
. Someone remind me to give myself 2 weeks to paint something, because it always goes a little something like this.