Warhammer 40K Techpriest Cosplays from Space Marine 2

 A couple of years ago I decided to get myself the Xbox Series X.  I'm a pretty awful gamer and don't really have a lot of time to play, but I already had an irresponsibly large flatscreen TV and it seemed like a nice treat to treat myself with a game console.

I didn't even take it out of the box for the first few months.  

Then Space Marine 2 dropped.  It had been thirteen years since the first Space Marine video game had launched and done such an amazing job of capturing the scale and brutaility of the Warhammer 40K universe.  That was one of my all-time favorite video games.  So when the sequel came out I took the next two days off to do nothing else but slash my way through the swarms of Tyranids, bathing in the blood of my enemies and loving every minute of it.

There's a lot of gorgous elements to the game and I ended up with a whole new cosplay build list.  For some reason, I decided to start with these guys:

Here's the finished result:

To see how we maked them, read on...

I get a big kick out of the Techpriests.  There's a really great quote in the lore that sums them up: 

"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel... One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will rot away, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is Immortal."

Essentially, their machinery fetish is so complete that they happily replace their own body parts with mechanical components at every opportunity until there's no rotting meat left.

Cool.

My friend Jeff Santos was available to do some 3D modeling, so we got started on this a a sort of backburner project to tinker with in between all of the other things we had going in the shop.  In no time at all, Jeff had created a presentable model for the collar armor:


Eager to get started, I printed, molded, cast, and painted the Adeptus Mechanicus icon for the chest:


Shortly after that, I got a jump on slicing up the collar and printing it out as well:


That's about the same time that life reared its ugly head, priorities and deadlines strated stacking up, and this whole thing got tucked away on a backburner to wait for someday.  When I had the occasional minute to spare, I did some bodyshop work to smooth out the print lines and hide the seams:


After who knows how many weeks of occasional attention and frequent neglect, the collar finally got a coat of primer:


Then my standard lightish red gloss coat:


While I was making slow progress with that, Jeff made huge leaps and bounds on modeling the backpack:

 
So when the print farm was idle, I went ahead and printed that too.  Here it is in the midst of getting smoothed out:


And primer:


Then lightish red:




This is about as far as Jeff got before he got a new gig with Disney Imagineering and I had to break in a couple of new modelers.  To get the helmet to a printable state, I reached out to Jacob Morin who started with a model ripped from the game:


In no time at all, he had it all smoothed out and ready for printing:


It was gorgeous:


A quick digital test fit made it clear it was going to be a snug fit, but that's just as it should be:


I had the master printed  up in no time at all:


Somewhere in there I also started working on the halberd:


Jacob also modeled an alternate faceplate:


While all that was going on, I continued printing and prepping little detail parts, like this AdMech logo that Jeff modeled for the backpack:


These little bits were set up for molding:

So was the backpack.  For that piece we did a matrix mold, starting with building up the matrix in clay:


Then we used aluminum flashing to build the parting wall:


We did the same thing with the collar.  First a clay matrix was built, then we put in aluminum flashing for the parting walls and laid up the fiberglass mothermold:


Once that had set up, we drilled holes along the flanges and cracked it open:


We removed only half of the mothermold and matrix for the backpack:


Then cleaned the clay out of the inside of the mothermolds:


Once the edges were trimmed, we bolted the mothermolds back into place:


The edges were sealed up with hot glue, and the void where the clay had been was filled with Mold Star 30 silicone:


I usually use Mold Max 30 (the pink stuff) for all of my silicone molds.  The problem is, as a tin cure silicone, it will inhibit the cure of polyester resins.  So when I'm planning on making fiberglass parts in a silicone mold, I have to use a platinum cure silicone.  That's why I used Mold Star 30 instead.  It's a very forgiving material, mixes one to one by volume (so you don't need a scale to measure the weight) and it cures pretty quickly provide you don't have any incompatible materials in contact with it.

So after curing, we opened up the molds, removed the masters, reassembled the molds, and applied a layer of greay gelcoat:


After a quick and dirty fiberglass layup, the collar was demolded and trimmed and looked like so:

Not too shabby.

The backpack was a shade more complex.  We started by laying both halves of the mold on the bench, then dusted the surface with a steel-colored bronzing powder before coating the surface with a layer of greay gelcoat just like the collar:


Since there were tons of tight little corners that would've been insanely hard to work fiberglass into, we mixed up a batch of fiberglass putty and smeared it into all of the sharp corners:


I get this stuff from a local fiberglass shop who produces it in-house.  Essentially they sweep up all of their cured fiberglass off-cuts at the end of each day, grind them into a powder, and stir them into some fresh liquid resin.  The end result has a viscosity about the same as toothpaste.  When you mix in some MEKP it hardens just like any polyester resin, but since it has glassfiber mixed into it, it's rock hard and can take a beating.

We smooged it into the corners on the front and back halves of the mold:


Once that was in place (and while it was still soft and squishy) we went ahead and added three layers of 3/4-oz fiberglass mat:


The putty underneath kept us from having to fight the fibers into place and sped things beautifully:


Once the two sides were laid up, the two halves of the mold were bolted together:


Then it was just a matter of applying gelcoat on the seam line, then laying up three layers of fiberglass mat over the seam to bind the two halves together.  

I didn't get any pics of that process, because much of it was done blind while sticking my gloved hands into the sticky icky insides of the mold with all of the uncured fiberglass resin.

Once the resin had cured, we popped the mold open and inside was this gorgeous piece of work:


The steel color that we dusted into the mold was adhered directly to the gelcoat, so if the paint ever gets scratched, the material under it will still look like metal.  At this stage I couldn't resist the urge to dry fit the other cast parts onto the pack:

While that was going on, we also got the helmet body tuned up and prepped for molding.  This started with my standard gloss coat of lightish red:


Then the holes were filled in with clay and the helmet was mounted on a board:


Before building the clay matrix, the whole thing was wrapped in plastic wrap:


Then we built up a 1/2" thick clay matrix with ridges for alignment and bubble flow, and a flange made up of aluminum flashing:


I didn't take any pictures of the fiberglass layup (because my hands were covered in sticky goo I didn't want on my phone) but once the fiberglass had cured we pried open the mothermold:


With the clay removed, the mothermold was cleaned out, mounted back in place around the master, and sealed up before we filleed it with silicone:


Once the silicone had cured, we removed the master and got to rotocasting.  In short order we had more helmet bodies than we knew what to do with.  In order to have as many variants as possible, we made the eye/nose section a separate part and 3D printed them as needed:


My nephew stopped by at some point, so we had him try on the helmet:


He was pretty creepy looking, but ultimately, anybody wearing one of these ends up looking pretty creepy:


By this point, I'd also printed the whole stack of little parts that became the poleaxe:


Is not smol:


Here's another creepy test fit with a set of parts and the axe:


To make storage and transportation easier, we set them up with threaded fittings so they could break down into three separate sections.  Once the glue was dry, Charlotte here was tasked with sanding down the printed parts and prepping for primer and paint:


This is also about the same time that my friend Crew Parker started turning out 3D models for some of the smaller parts of the backpack.  These were resin printed:


This included this nifty little three-fingered claw that hangs off the bottom of the backpack:


And this other, littler, two-fingered claw to hang off of the backpack:


While those were cooking, it was time to start on my favorite part: PAINT!

The collar and other parts were given a basecoat of Rustoleum Dark Steel:




The grips on the axes were picked out in a gunmetal metallic:


The pieces that needed the trim picked out were masked off and the trim was painted gold:


When that was all dry, we started doing final assembly.  This included attaching the custom hoses we'd made for the helmet snoots:

More on hose making in a separate post.

Rachel and I picked out the black and white details on the axe heads by hand:


Then I busied myself with adding the smaller details to the collars and backpacks:

While those were coming together, we maked the one last thing; an incense burner (aka, a grimdark smelly ball):

I added some brass chain and gold paint:


Then decided to give it a test drive with some diesel train scented incense (yes, really):

Now that the other pieces had the right shapes and colors and smells, it was time to get Rachel started on the robes:

The pattern was simple enough to throw together, so as soon as we had a wearable robe, naturally we needed to do another test fitting:


Satisfied with the fit, she got to adding the little bits of trim and edging:


The final sewing step was for Kate and Rachel to add contrast stitching by hand:


Since nothing in the 40K universe is particularly clean and/or shiny, and these guys were basically the mechanics and janitors of the Imperium of Man, their robes needed some grunge:


Much of the aging and weathering was done by simply misting on browns, greays, and blacks with spraycans:


But nothing is quite so effective as just setting fire to yourself:


But then snuffing it out before it hurts:

Burning holes and singeing the edges was the best way to make these guys look like they'd been sticking their filthy little mechadendrites into Imperial oil sumps and air filters and grease fittings for centuries.  So with the parts weathered and robes appropriately singed, it was time to load everything in the car and head south:

We got a late start when we finally left the shop, so it wasn't until well past midnight that we'd arrived at the hotel.

After a solid night's rest, we unloaded the car and got everything stacked up in the hotel:

Things look really good in neat little rows:


On the Saturday morning, it was time for final touches and dressing:

This meant that for a few minutes, the hotel room became T&A Workshop South:

For my part, I did the final assembly on the little claws:


Since we didn't get around to modeling and printing good-looking forearm parts, Rachel and Charlotte threw together some last-minute forearm parts:


These were basically just pieces of tubing and rods that would attach like bracelets around the black-clad forearms:

Then Crew showed up and it was time to start getting each other into costume:

Which looked particularly weird in an otherwise normal hotel room:




We then commandeered an elevator in the name of the Omnissiah:


The Machine Spirit awoke and carried us safely to the lobby:

Right away we were stopped for photos as we left the hotel lobby:

My friend Lila was along and took all kinds of random photos:

Some of which were downright charming:


Or disorienting:


In any case, we had a good time wandering through the convention, interacting with its many mechanical attendees:

And flesh-based fans of all sizes:


At the end of the day, I would call the build a success.  Crew seemed happy:


And I was reminded I still need to seal the primer inside the helmets:


But they look pretty darned good:


There's still room for improvement though.  I didn't get around to finishing the drill arm that Crew modeled for one of the backpacks:

And I started printing, but didn't finish the claw arm for another one of the packs:

The helmet eye lenses still need a blue glow and the characters need sound effects and voice boxes, and I'm sure I'll think of at least a handful of additional upgrades, but for now, they're at least ready to wear.

Or place in statue mode, like this guy:

More to come.  Stay tuned...