
Still, these are the sacrifices you make in order to look good. In order to be as accurate to the game as possible, the visibility in this helmet was going to be awful. While I continued sculpting the main portion of the helmet in clay, I built the faceshield prototype out of sheet styrene heated and bent to shape: It got some tinkering attention here and there, but it was still a while before I got back to work on it. When I returned, I rolled right into preparations for the Maker Faire and this project stayed on the backburner. I dropped everything and flew off to Okinawa for a month and a half worth of work with the 7th Fleet Commander's staff aboard the USS BLUE RIDGE.

This is the point when the Navy called me up to go and help out with Operation Tomodachi. To get an idea of what I was going to build, I made a mockup of the faceshield out of cardstock paper: After a few hours of tinkering with the main portion of the helmet, here's what I had: In order to keep the helmet fairly form-fitting while still allowing the wearer to get in and out of it, I decided that the faceplate should be removable. In this case, I was using a sculpting armature from and an old child-sized motorcycle helmet that was laying around in the workshop:

To begin this project, I set up my base for sculpting.

Here's a snapshot showcasing the finished helmet:Ĭomplete details about the build process after the jump. I failed, but only because I was interrupted by a major nuclear disaster. That's one month to sculpt, mold, cast, paint, and wire up the electronics for the helmet. Since most of my projects tend to take a long time (the curse of having plenty of time), I decided to give myself a month for the helmet as an exercise in meeting deadlines. For some time I've been wanting to make Isaac Clarke's engineering suit from DEAD SPACE 2, and was finally prompted to get it started.
