Halo 4 Armor – Foam Armor – Update 4: Lower ab/groin armor

 

It’s been a few days but I’ve been hard at work with the foam. Keeping up with the “let’s do the smaller bits first” I decided to work on the lower-ab/groin protection armor. In past Halo games this armor has been part of the belt/cod piece but in Halo 4 the Spartan-IV armor is a little bit more minimalized  there’s no belt. There’s just the hip protection, tailbone armor and cod piece. And the cod piece is extended to the lower ab and, depending on the armor you use, connects to the ab plate.

Anyways, here’s a couple of reference pictures before we get started. A head on shot and then the Recon (which is what I’m aiming at).

 

Looks easy enough right? Well, it took me a few tries before I got something I liked.

More after the jump…

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Halo 4 Armor – Foam Armor – Update 3: Recon ab plate armor

 

Second part of this week I worked on creating the Halo 4 Recon ab armor. Here’s my main reference image (it’s the small sucker on the bottom):

Pretty simple design. So like with the hand guards and the tailbone armor, we decided to create our own ab plate template.

More on putting this together after the jump…

Halo 4 Armor – Foam Armor – Update 2: Handguard

Quick update today. Last night I created the handguards for the Halo 4 suit.

Like everything else, there were several handguard options. In game it changes with the forearm. I went through those options and wasn’t blown away by any of them. The main one has this Micky Mouse glove look to it:

But hey, it’s a handguard so who cares, right? Anyways, I took this lack of exciting armor to come up with my own idea. I was watching Batman: The Animated Series while sketching a few ideas so…

That was Sunday night. Last night I went and made a more accurate design with three basic layers — a large hectagon as the base, a skinnier one on top of that, and a wide “batsignal”/warped-H as the top.

More after the jump…

Halo 4 Armor – Foam Armor – Update 1: Tailbone

So my EVA foam came in the other day. Wohoo! Means I can start with the fun and experimental process of building Halo armor out of foam. I say experimental because I’ve never used EVA foam before for costuming or armor building. I tried the cardstock paper/Pepakura method and lots of people get amazing results with it but I had a few issues with it:

1) So many tabs
2) Easily warps
3) Can’t easily customize the size
4) If you screw up, ooops…
5) I live in a small Boston apartment. No room to do the resining and bondoing, etc.

Foam, on the other hand, is a bit more to my taste. I can customize each piece to fit me the way I’m built and not try to force a presized file to fit me with scaling. Also, if I screw up I can easily just cut that piece out again or reshape it as needed, depending on the issue. And since the foam is already pretty rigid it’s a lot easier to finalize. So those are my thoughts on that.

Over the weekend, the girlfriend and I decided to take on a simple and easier looking part of the Halo 4 armor first — the tailbone armor. I found some great Pepakura files for the tailbone armor on the 405th and tried turning that file into something I could then use with foam via TheSuperHeroTutorials vids. but even after following Stealth’s ideas that butt piece was still to complicated to turn from paper, so we decided to just draft our own pattern ourselves. Here’s a screencap from the game of what we were aiming for:

Note: There are different tailbone/butt armor in the game. It changes when you change the leg armor, so play around and find the one you like for foam crafting.

More after the jump…