Building Trazyn the Infinite for Games Workshop

Back in July I was at San Diego Comic Con unveiling a pair of Magic Wheelchair cosplays we'd built when I got a text from my contact at Games Workshop. 

"What would it take for you to build a wearable version of Trazyn the Infinite?" he asked.

For thems of you who don't know, this is Trazyn the Infinite:


"I'll need three months and here's a price," says I.

"Okay," he replied, "thanks anyway."

That was at the beginning of the convention and I tried not to think about it too much.  But I tend to be pretty inexpensive for the kind of work I do, so I had a hard time shaking this one off.  During a fuel stop on the way home, I couldn't help but text the question:

"Just out of curiosity," I texted, "how much were you expecting to spend?"

"The problem wasn't the price," he replied, "it was the timeline.  We need it in Nottingham in September."

"Alright," says I, "I'm going to hate myself for this later, but if we begin right away we can pull this off."

By the time the project was fully approved we had just about six weeks before Trazyn had to be walking around the show floor halfway around the world.

Awesome.

This build was done using every kind of tech I have in my shop as well as some old-school analog techniques. Normally I'd like to break up a project like this into sensible parts so you can see how each piece came together in a nice, palatable little package.  But that's not at all how these things actually happen.  In this case (like so many of my builds) all of the parts were largely done simultaneously.

So this writeup will seem like it jumps all over the place. Pieces were being 3D printed, CNC carved, hand-sculpted, painted, vacformed, rigged, weathered, and rebuilt all at the same time in the great whirling slide puzzle that is my workshop.  So here's the whole fabrication tornado in largely chronological order.  Try to keep up...

It started with a Zoom meeting and photos of the character's miniature from Games Workshop's website:

We discussed what kind of performance the costume was needed for and the rough scaling of the various parts.  We were also provided with some key art like this:



And this image as he appears on the cover of the novel "The Infinite and the Divine" (available here: LINK):

So I went straight to Jeff Santos, my go-to collaborator for most of my 3D modelling needs lately.  I'm sure I've mentioned him before, but if you're not familiar with his work, you should check out his Artstation page here: LINK

There was a not-so-great 3D model online and was able to use it to roughly illustrate what I needed Jeff to model.  Here you can see a rough approximation of how the costume would fit onto a human carcass despite the very not human proportions of a Necron Overlord:

To minimize the time I'd spend sitting idle while Jeff worked out the digital sculpting, we started with the staff.  Jeff was able to churn out this model in no time at all:


Once he was done sculpting out all of the shapes, it was sent to me so I could work out where to put all of the mechanical connections and add pathways to fit in the necessary electronics to make it all light up.

So Jeff went to work sculpting out the rest of the character while I got started printing out the staff parts.  We had eight FDM printers working non-stop and in short order we'd printed all of the opaque parts in ABS plastic:


The glowy parts were printed on my Elegoo resin printers using a transparent green resin:


Jeff's early renders of the sculpt were looking pretty good:


Pretty quickly he was able to send me the head:


Which I jumped right ahead and started printing:


Like a flash, we had the whole thing assembled, cleaned up, and primed:


Given the inconsistencies between the artwork, the miniatures, the animated appearance, and the action figures we were using for reference, Jeff had done a pretty amazing job on the digital model.  Still, there were a few subtle changes that needed to be made.  Fortunately he's really good at responding to feedback and we tweaked the head to get the final form:

Among other details, I had him separate out the frame around the eyes so we would have an easier time cleaning up the print lines in that deeply recessed area.

Here's the printed version two head:


And the resin-printed eye frame complete with clear green eye:


At this point the last few parts of the staff were printed:


Most of them were able to be printed in single parts.  But to speed things up, the lowest section of the "blade" on each side was printed in three parts that then had to be seamed together:


We also got a jump on CNC carving the vacforming bucks for the loincloth parts:


By then, Jeff had pretty much nailed the shapes of the ribcage, shoulder, and hood:


So we started printing the ribcage:


At this point it started to get tricky keeping track of all of the parts.  So as soon as we had every section of any component printed, it was time to assemble it:


While that was going on, we started CNC carving the forming bucks for the legs using my Carvewright Raven* CNC machine:


And we got the top parts of the staff together enough for a trial assembly:


Then the shoulders were printed and assembled:


And Kevin the Peacock started making regular visits to the workshop:


Next thing you know, we had enough parts put together to do a quick and dirty gaff tape test fitting:


I was very happy with the current state of the project:


The plan was to mount all of the upper body parts to an ALICE pack frame so that the full load could be carried mostly on the hips to help the wearer with what was expected to be a pretty heavy costume.  Fortunately, all of the parts fit with the pack frame in place and a bit of room to spare:


The next step was to mount the spine details that would run along the crest of the hood:


While I was tinkering with that, filler primer was drying on version 2.0 of the head:


Bodyshop work continued on the ribcage:


And the day ended with the final coat of primer on the version 2.0 head prototype:


The next day saw the continuation of bodyshop work on the chest and shoulders:


I had had a couple of parts of the shoulders where edges of the prints had lifted a bit during the printing process.  For most folks, these would've been called failed prints and just reprinted, but with the rush we were in, it was faster to just seam them together and Bondo the gaps. 

Since they were going to be molded and cast in fiberglass, it didn't matter if the masters at this stage were breakable.  We could've whittled them out of cheddar cheese for all that mattered.**

While the ribs and shoulders were being ironed out, the staff parts were nearing completion:


And the forming bucks for the thighs were still being carved out:


Since the knees were interchangeable, we were able to print just one resin master:


This would be molded and cast in urethane resin for a lighter, more durable part.

While all of that was happening in the shop, Jeff was off-site working on the hands.  The best reference we had for the hands was from the animated short called "TITLE" on the WarhammerTV streaming platform.  Here's a screenshot:


The fact that the silver parts of the fingers don't wrap all the way around the first two joints, was actually really lucky for us.  This would make it much easier to fabricate and attach them to a pair of gloves.

So Jeff made relatively quick work of the sculpt:


The finger bits were resin printed using SUNLU black ABS-like resin:


They would be cleaned up and painted before adhering them to a thin neoprene dive glove, but for now, they looked pretty good:


At this point, I had Michael on board to do a lot of the turd polishing.  He was responsible for most of the sanding and smoothing on the chest and shoulders.  Here he is happily polishing on of the shoulders in preparation for molding:


The shoulders and ribcage were painted with a couple coats of gloss berry pink from Rustoleum, then wet-sanded to 600 grit before getting three coats of mold release wax.  Here they are drying between coats of wax:


The head and knee were also given a glossy pink coat prior to molding:


And the slices of the thigh forming bucks were trimmed and assembled:


While that was going on, Rachel got a start on the sculpt for the sides of the hood:


The initial plan was to make the shape out of a series of strips of flat plastic stock cut and shaped to lay together.  Ultimately we abandoned this plan.  More on that later.

At this point, the staff parts got their final coat of primer:


And we printed an elbow master:


The elbow was basically just a resized copy of the model for the knee.  No sense re-inventing the wheel.

At this point, we had our first hiccup.  While carving out the forming bucks for the first half of the forearms, the CNC machine ran into a problem, cutting this weird line instead of carving out the last two sections:


It turns out that the drive belt for the Y-axis broke:

Apparently that's not a thing that happens.  I guess I was working this machine pretty hard.

After replacing the belt, I started the carve for another part, then got back to work on the hood.

The new plan was to wrap the whole thing in parchment paper to seal off the openings, then fill it with expanding foam.  After a bit of shaping with a hand saw and a rasp, it was already showing promise:


This is also the same time the first piece of the build could be called finished.  This is the spirit stone, one of the stolen trophy artefacts he has hanging off of his guts:


Back to the hood sculpt, the foam was sanded down to shape and then covered with Bondo to form a hard skin:


Once that had set up, I laid out the panel lines for the overlapping flaps that appear on the sides:


This is about the time the hand parts were done printing:


While waiting for Bondo to set up on the hood, I spent a bit of time wiring up the LED arrays for the staff:


The orb was lit by an LED strip wrapped around a core.  The orb was filled with fiberglass mat to act as a diffuser.  The final effect was pretty great:


To light the recessed areas in the blade, I used more of the same LED strip to edge-light the resin printed sections:


The hollows in the middle of each section were then packed with cellophane to catch the light and more LED strip was put in place to make it even brighter:


Each blade was wired up separately and the leads were fished down through the aluminum tube down the center of the staff prior to final assembly:


The whole thing ran on twelve volts provided by a pair of 4-pack AA battery holders wired in series.  Once they were plugged in, the whole thing was looking great:


So great:


This was the same day the cape parts arrived.  I don't have a laser cutter of my own*** and all of the laser cutters I usually have access to were either broken down or otherwise unavailable.  We needed 118 matching shingles cut out in a hurry and I didn't have the time or manpower to have someone sit and cut them all out by hand.  

So the distant fourth choice was to have the parts CNC cut out of ABS plastic.  This was done by sendcutsend.com and delivered in just a few days:


While this was happening, the thigh forming bucks were still coming together:


The finger parts were cleaned up and primed and given their initial silver coat:


Meanwhile, Rachel got the ribcage and shoulders mounted for molding and started adding clay margins:


Once those were set up, they were given a healthy coat of PVA mold release:


The day ended with everything slathered in gelcoat, the first step in creating fiberglass molds:


The next day I got an early jump on laying up the fiberglass on the ribs and shoulders:


At mid-day, there were sirens and smoke and it turns out a neighbor's field had caught fire and burned.  Fortunately, by the time we were able to get outside and see what was going on, CAL-FIRE had mostly extinguished it:


After a brief lunch break, we were back in the shop so I could cut the molds apart and fit them with aluminum flashing to make proper parting lines:


The next day my sheet styrene shipment showed up:


After signing for the shipment, we jumped back into fiberglass mode and laid up the mold flanges:


This was pretty quick work:


Once everything had cured, we drilled bolt holes in the flanges, pried the molds open, and started prepping them for layup:


Tia loves polishing molds:


So does Michael:


This was basically the rest of their day:


While they were tuning up the molds for layup, I got back to work on the hood sculpt.  I started by building the edges where the plates would step from one level to the next.  This was accomplished by making the edges with foam mounting tape:


This would work to give me a repeatable ledge a little over 1/16th of an inch thick to build up Bondo against:


After a couple passes with filling and sanding, the tape was removed:


The first coat of primer made it clear I was on the right track:


The next day, Rachel started setting up the head, knee, and elbow for molding.  This started by mounting the head to a board and covering it in plastic wrap:


Then a 3/8" thick layer of clay was built up over this and registration keys were added before flashing was added to make a parting wall:


Here's how it looks from end-on:


The knee and elbow were set up the same way:


They were thoroughly coated with PVA release, then fiberglassed over:


While that was happening, I painted the green parts of the staff:

These started with a base coat of Hunter Green Rustoleum, then highlighted with John Deere Green.  Once that had dried, they got a couple coats of green-to-gold color shift paint, then a couple more coats of Duplicolor pearl clearcoat.  The goal was to make an otherworldly finish, but a lot of that won't be noticed once the lights are turned on.

Meanwhile, the molds were waxed, PVA coated, and reassembled prior to getting a layer of greay gelcoat:


Then I got started laying up the parts:


Rachel jumped in on the layup and in no time at all we'd glassed the chest, shoulders, and pelvis parts:


While that was curing, the flanges for the mothermolds for the head, knee, and elbow were drilled for bolt holes:


The mothermolds were pried off and the clay was removed:


The next day, Tia de-molded the fiberglass parts while Rachel sealed up the mothermolds:


And I continued churning on the sculpt for the hood:


It was really close to done, I just kept finding a bunch of tiny details that needed attention:


Later in the day, Tia started cleaning up the fiberglass parts:


While Rachel poured the silicone jackets for teh head, knee, and elbow molds:


The next day, Rachel rotocast a couple of copies of the head and a full set of knees and elbows:


I put the final layer of filler primer on the hood sculpture:


And we finally got started vacforming parts:


And making headway trimming the fiberglass parts:

Rough trimmed the resin cast parts as well:


At this point we had a little over two weeks until everything had to ship.  That sounds like a lot, but...

This is where we had to pause this mad scramble to build and deliver a Magic Wheelchair build for Axel at Rose City Comic Con up in Portland. He wanted us to dress his wheelchair up to look like the truck version of Optimus Prime in the Rescue Bots series:

Mission accomplished.

Four days later we were back in the shop.  I got to work fine-tuning the hood sculpt:


Rachel assembled the forearm forming bucks and hand-sculpted the missing slices to get us caught up and back on track:


Meanwhile, I sliced up the upper arm forms and 3D printed them. To speed up printing, I cut them into lots of smaller pieces that could be split up among several machines and printed simultaneously. Then glued them back together and did a quick rough sanding pass to get rid of the ugly seam lines:


The forearms came out gorgeous when we vacformed them:


The upper arms, not so much:


It turns out that when I glued the seams together I'd inadvertently made hard parts in the forming bucks. So when we vacformed the parts, most of the forming bucks were compressed ever so slightly while the seams stayed rigid, creating raised lines running across the formed parts. While there was a good chance we could hide this with a bit of bodyshop and paint work, I wasn't happy with the look. We would have to do better. While I was sorting that out, Michael was hard at work prepping the chest and shoulder parts for paint:


And I also put the final gloss coat on the hood sculpt:


Somewhere in there I also did an initial assembly of the head of the staff:


And painted the head in it's base silver color:


The next day I wet-sanded and waxed the hood in preparation for molding:


This piece was a bit of a headache to mold. The spine details were too small and the corners were too tight to mold it with a straight fiberglass. At the same time, I didn't have enough platinum cure silicone on hand to make a rubber mold jacket over the whole thing. So I opted for just making a rubber jacket for the spine and a regular fiberglass mold for the rest of it.

I started by putting a strip of masking tape down either side:


This is where I ended up building clay walls and started brushing up the silicone jacket:


In this case I'm using Mold Star 30, a platinum cure silicone from Smooth-On. The reason I'm using platinum cure instead of my usual tin cure is that the tin cure silicone will typically inhibit the cure of polyester resins. I didn't want to deal with any of that, so platinum cure was the way to go. The kit I had in stock was very near the end of its shelf life though, so there was a lot of things that could have gone wrong at this stage.

Fortunately, everything worked out and with the help of a little Thi-Vex thixotropic additive, I was able to build up a pretty solid mold jacket:


The next day I came in and started by painting the teal basecoat onto the ribcage:

Something about seeing that piece in its final color gave me great hope that the whole thing was working and we were pulling it off.

Then I got back to work on the hood mold:


With the silicone jacket fully cured, the next step was to gelcoat the remaining exposed portions of the hood, then lay up a fiberglass shell over the whole thing:


The next day, I went ahead and cut apart the shell in order to split it into parts that could be removed from the master:


Sheet metal flashing was placed into the cuts and I got to work glassing up the mold flanges on either side of the flashing:


While I was doing that, Rachel got to work on making improved forming bucks for the upper arms. She started by nesting the vacformed parts in some sandbags and placing gaff tape across the openings so they wouldn't get distorted:


Then she mixed up a batch of Hydrocal and filled them to the top:




While she was doing that and I was waiting for the fiberglass to cure on the hood mold, I got a start on the internal structure for the feet:


Things were shaping up nicely as we were nearing the home stretch. While I was working on the foot parts, the fiberglass on the hood mold flanges had set up enough to start drilling bolt holes:


Then I was able to pry the mold sections off of the master:


And remove the rubber jacket from the spine section:


At this point we had less than a week to get everything made, rigged, painted, and packed for shipping.

No pressure.

The next day I got to clean up the edges of the fiberglass mold sections to make them easier to handle without all the stabby bits, then wet-sand, polish, and wax the orange gelcoat sections prior to applying the PVA mold release. Then I bolted the whole thing back together and applied a generous layer of black gelcoat:


While that was setting up, we vacformed a couple pairs of calves from 3D printed forming bucks:


And I spent some quality time doing old-school woodworking to make the forming bucks for the feet:


While I did that, Rachel popped the Hydrocal castings of the upper arm forms out of the vacformed shell and sanded down the ridges from the 3D printed forms. Then I used these new, smooth, homogenously hard forming bucks, to pull new, smooth upper arm parts:


Somewhere in there, Michael set up all of the cape tiles and gave them a coat of the only greay that really looked right:


Once everyone else had gone home that night, I set to work glassing up the hood:


Just to toot my own horn for a moment here, the fiberglass layup for this piece was a significant technical challenge. There were countless tiny little nooks and crannies to work the glass into. Some parts of it had to be done blind, working around a corner and stippling the resin into the glass usinga chip brush with the handle broken off because there wasn't enough room to clear the full length of the brush.

Keeping the weight down meant that I couldn't just mix a blob of filler material and wedge it into the recesses. Instead, I had to take care to build up enough thickness for strength without letting the resin pool anywhere. It was a beast, but I beat it:

The total time to lay up the part was just over three hours from the moment I put on gloves and started pouring resin to the moment I stepped outside, got a big gulp of fresh air, and walked back in to snap this pic:


Most of that three hours was spent with my head and shoulders fully inside the mold with a headlamp so I could see what I was doing.

Good times.

Of course, the real moment of truth wasn't until the next day when I'd successfully demolded the whole gorgeous piece:


Rachel masked off the shoulders and painted the teal trim:


I started vacforming foot parts:


Somewhere in there we started assembling the leg parts. Each piece of the leg was actually vacformed in two layers. This way we could cut the recesses out of the top layer and then go back and solvent weld them together. This made for a thicker, stronger piece with really sharp edges for the embossed details:


Of course, it does mean using all manner of clamps and magnets and sandbags to hold everything in place while the solvent flashes off. Here's the setup we had to keep the thighs together:


Once the solvent welding was done, Rachel went over the seams with Free Form Air, an epoxy-based dough that cures strong and lightweight in pretty short order:


While she was smoothing out the leg parts, I set to work fine tuning the head:


And smoothing out the fiberglass hood:


Somewhere in there, we trimmed the knees and elbows, then primed them and gave them their base silver:


Same goes for the upper arms:


The icon for the chest was resin printed. Here it is in black primer after a bit of cleanup work:


Here's a full set of foot parts after rough trimming and whatnot:


And the thighs when their bodyshop work was halfway done:


Once they were sanded smooth, the base silver really made the thighs look great:


Things were really starting to shape up at this point, but time was running out. I called in my old assistant Kate to help take up some of the slack. She got the tedious job of riveting all of the cape plates onto the webbing that would hold the whole cape together:


The cape was made of 118 matching plates of ABS plastic painted Mechanicum Standard Grey. Each one was drilled and riveted onto a piece of thin nylon webbing with two pop rivets. Each rivet had to pass through a hole melted in the nylon webbing with a soldering iron and backed with an aluminum washer. It was a lot of repetitive work, but Kate was happy to do it:


Meanwhile, I got the hood prepped, primed, and painted silver:


The next morning I finalized the assembly and wiring for the staff:

This thing is gorgeous!

I also wired up the LED arrays for the guts and fed them through the clear tubes that would hang below the ribcage:


With the shoulders bolted in place, this guy was starting to come to life:


Still, there was no time to rest. The next morning I finalized the assembly of the feet:


Then I took them for a test-drive while finishing up the assembly of the cape:


Kate got to work blackwashing all of the silver parts:


And the gold parts:


Rachel applied a layer of headliner fabric to the inside of the hood and I finalized the wiring and rigging for the head:


The day before we had to ship the whole thing to the UK, my friend Joe stopped by for a test fitting. He was the closest size match I had for the person who would be wearing it for the debut. We dressed him in everything but the leg parts:


Aside from the weight of the cape, he seemed pretty comfortable:


Joe had to run off to another event, but a little later that day we did one more rigging test with my friend Barrie in the suit:


He looked pretty damned good, but was even better looking when we turned off the overhead lighting:


I'm pretty damned proud of the final result:


So having had two successful test fittings, the whole suit was wrapped and packed for shipping:


As luck would have it, the entire thing fits snugly into the back of my Jeep:


The whole shipment arrived on time and unscathed. Everything fit well enough to wear despite the fact that we were never given an opportunity to test fit the actual performer who was going to wear it and I'm told there will soon be professional photos of the final product posted from the event.

For now, all I have is a few snapshots from Warhammer World in Nottingham:






More to come. Stay tuned...

*Interested in getting your own Raven CNC machine?  Go to carvewright.com and check it out. Enter the discount code "tandaworkshop" at checkout for $100 off any Raven CNC router package.

**Kidding.  Cheddar cheese is a terrible sculpting medium.  It shrinks and hardens if left out in contact with air.

***I really need to get a laser cutter of my own, but I know that whatever machine I get will end up not being quite what I need.