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… Continue reading →