Isaac Clarke's Engineering RIG Costume

A while back I posted about building the helmet for Isaac Clarke's engineering RIG from Dead Space 2



Wearing the helmet and nothing else looks wrong.  Plus, it tends to disturb the other patrons in the coffee shop I frequent.  This means I absolutely had to build the rest of the RIG.


Here's the end result:

For details on how I made it (and a few better pictures), read on.



I started with the neck piece:



It was made from a piece of acrylic tube, a piece of a plywood cylinder, some PVC pipe, and oodles of scraps of sheet styrene in various thicknesses.


For a while I was even doing a half-decent job of keeping a neat(ish) workspace for this build:



After the neck piece was done, I made the little riblet details for the chest.  They're essentially just six unique pieces repeated six times, so I only had to make one set of prototypes:



Then I sculpted the large back piece in clay with a few found items thrown in:



Here's the finished sculpt:



Here's the rubber jacket mold and fiberglass mothermold:



And here's the first casting out of the mold.  I made the little greeblie details separate castings:



For the health tube, I cooked up a sheet of blue-tinted acrylic and bent it to fit.  Here's an early lighting test using EL wire:



Here you can see the nasty mess on the inside:



Having made a mold for the neck piece and the little riblets, I cast copies of them as well and started laying them out as they would appear on the costume:



The right arm also has a series of repeating parts.  After careful study, I decided I could make all twelve of the bronze colored parts out of only four unique pieces:



The problem is that the shoulder and chest parts all have a curve to them.  Molding pieces with such a curve is a massive pain in the buttocks, so I decided to cheat a little bit and make them flat. 





When the resin had kicked just enough to pull it out of the mold without falling apart, I pulled the pieces and bent them to the curve I needed:



Since I don't enough time (or hands) to stand around holding all of these things in the curve that I want, the next step is to lay them inside a piece of plywood cylinder I had laying around:



Then I clamp them in place and wait for the resin to finish curing:



The left arm would only need the shoulder bit and the bicep band.  I made these out of MDF on the bandsaw:



There are also rings around the thighs just above the knees, so I cut one of them from MDF as well.  Here's the bicep and thigh rings as well as the left shoulder bit all painted up and ready for molding:



The gauntlets made for an interesting build with their overwhelming volume of details.  I cobbled them together from scrap sheets of ABS and styrene I had leftover from other projects.  Here's the inside of the left:



Here's the outside:



Once I was happy with the build, I gave it a coat of primer to make sure it still looked good when it was all one color:



Then I capped the end and prepped it for molding:



The right forearm was done the same way.  Here's a shot of it prepped for molding:



The molds for the gauntlets were simple matrix molds.  Here's the one for the right gauntlet:



After rotocasting one of each, it was time to start prepping them for paint:



Of course, with the ends cut open I couldn't resist the urge to try them on:



Somewhere toward the end of this build, my workshop camera walked off and I didn't get pictures of the prototypes for a few parts. In that time I sculpted, molded and cast the left hand parts:



The tailbone:



The straps and greeblies for the right thigh too:



About this same time I also put together a belt buckle from MDF and bits of styrene:



That done, I started working on the boots.  It turns out that the hard parts of the boots are nearly identical from left to right.  So I decided to cheat a bit and only make one set of prototypes.  Here's an early shot of the shin/calf part which I'd thrown together from bits of sheet stock:



Here's the toe:



Here's all three of the pieces of the boot before the went under the rubber:



Boot molds in progress on my increasingly messy workbench:



Here's the boots all stacked together before painting:



Under the bronze-looking parts on the chest there are an array of straps that seem to hold them all together. To simulate this, I made a bunch of strips of 1/4" fiberboard:



Then I laid them out on the forming table and made a pull in .040" ABS plastic:



After cutting them out on the bandsaw, they really looked the part:



Back in the workshop, I put a coat of black primer on all of the parts:



There's a lot of parts. Once the primer had dried, I gave it all a bronze basecoat:



Just like the helmet, various parts were picked out in different shades of Model Masters Metalizers:



I also picked out a lot of parts in gloss black:



After the airbrushing was done, it was time for a blackwash to age it all:





Once I'd decided on how to attach the rig parts to the chest, it was time to head over to Barta Hide in Petaluma and pick up some leather scraps and remnants.  Barta has the best deals I've ever found for leather, provided you can cope with the smells while you dig through their scrap bins:



I made a quick pattern out of butcher paper and convinced my friend Breana to throw together a leather vest for me. Here's the parts cut out:



Once the vest was stitched together, it was time to lay out the hard parts:



While I was tinkering with the vest, it was time to finalize the wiring. I gave my friend Matt a rough idea of how I envisioned it and handed him a couple of printed screen captures from the game and he came up with this:



It works:





To assemble the vest, I used rivets through the leather to attach all of the straps and chunks of armor. Here's a shot of the inside:



Here I am trying it on:





Here's the vest all put together:


I also had Breana add a leather seat to a pair of grey short-sleeved Dickies coveralls and riveted a few pieces of the armor onto them.  Here's an early test fitting:





The test fitting was done using Trevor the walking mannequin. He's a good sport and usually manages to hold still while I poke holes in his clothing with a soldering iron and then drive in pop rivets:



Here's another shot of the RIG coming together:



Using black and red rattlecan primer, I added some stains and weathering to the coveralls:



Some days I feel sorry for Trevor, but then I figure it's his own fault for being about my size and willing to suffer. Either way, he seems to be okay with being dressed up and abused if only because it means he gets to stand around looking like this:



Final assembly of the RIG required 176 pop rivets, 14 wood screws, 4 zip ties, and (somehow) absolutely no bleeding.  Here's some dimly-lit shots of the end result:





I still need to take this costume out for a location photoshoot armed with something other than a DeWalt cordless drill and throw together a more convincing Necromorph than my friend Matt:


But you get the idea.

I've got an even bigger costume project in the works right now.  As always, stay tuned...