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DancinFool
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
Yeah the upper body for a grimlock transformation isn't so bad, its figuring how to fold up the legs. yeah I'm pretty sure after this year I'm gonna build something transformable, I also want to do a devastator costume on stilts, I think that would look pretty wicked. What do you use as your main building material in your costumes? I've tried chicken wire, for my first optimus costume, wiremesh and wooden frame for my megatron costume, and this past year I used polystyrene with papermache and that seems to have given me the best results, but I don't know how durable it would be to attempt a transformation.
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4/17/2004, 7:44 pm
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derepentignymarc
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
well my frames are always made of cardboard reenforced where needed with plastic i find it the best combination possible also one of the cheapest to build.... i tried one entirely of sintra plastic but with expensive and desastreous results... altough i won a caribean cruise 2 days later i had to work almost 48 hrs straight to repair where it had failed....had to rebuild the entire body frame from scratch... but i did it !!! that is why if you ever have the idea to build with a plastic called sintra DONT you,ll go nuts when things start falling appart.... i should soon have a high defenition camera and will try to post great new pics soon to show you what i mean....
mark
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4/18/2004, 3:44 am
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DancinFool
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
cool, can't wait to see, what kind of plastic do you use to reinforce the cardboard, that sintra stuff you were talking about?
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4/18/2004, 6:26 pm
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derepentignymarc
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
no stay away from anything that is called sintra it,s expensive and too heavy and not very flexible what you shoud use is styreen sheets that will help you allot in any project.....
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4/18/2004, 8:30 pm
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TFCosplay
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Re: G1 Grimlock and Devastator costumes
With the Grimlock legs, I'd look at doing it almost identically to the toy. Create the two halves of the rear dino torso and tail, then temporarily remove the small tail pieces (the ones that fold out to the sides on the original toy). Leave a large cut-out in each torso piece, on the backs of the robot legs/underside of the T-Rex.
Lie on your stomach (or do a push-up on your knees) and bend your knees as far as they will comfortably go, so your feet are as close to your butt as you can get them. Place the body segments together in dino mode and slip them over your legs. These will have to pretty much attach to your lower legs in the position they're now in (fill the gap with foam or something to hold them, but leave your upper legs unattached).
Now, with the body segments attached to your lower legs, unbend your knees fully. Your upper legs should move through the cutouts you made in step 1. You'll be left with bare upper legs and huge dino-booties which will have no backs to them.
For the upper legs, you can adorn them however you want- they'll be covered in dino mode. Just remember that they'll have to fit through the cutouts on the back of the boots, so adjust the cutouts to fit.
To deal with the gaps in the back of the boots in robot mode, you could have part of the outer shell of the boots hinged vertically, so that it folds back around and covers the hole. Or you could make it grey spandex, stretched over a rectangular frame (or just four pegs) so it looks like a solid panel in robot mode but can flex when you bend your knees into dino mode.
Add the missing tail segments and you're ready to go. Note that the longer the tail segments are, the shorter the boots can be. Useful, if the boots start out far too large.
Another useful idea might be some kind of mechanism that helps the lower robot legs attach to each other in dino mode, keeping the dino shape together and stable against involuntary twitches.
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As for Devastator, this would rock if done in detail. Would you need the stilts, or would a six-to-seven-foot-tall version work just as well?
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For materials, has anyone tried vacuumformed plastic, thermoform adhesive, craft foam and polystyrene sheeting, or fiberglass?
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I must admit, I've never thought that a transforming Grimlock costume could be made to work due to the whole knuckle-walking issue (although a kind of shuffling walk could be used, I guess). I've scribbled down costume transformation schemes for most of the G1 characters, but Big Grim was always one of the "impossibles". If you can make it work, please let us know how you did it!
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TFCosplay: Transform yourself
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4/19/2004, 8:01 am
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DancinFool
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
yeah I'd like to do it on stilts just to make it look really big, and then I want to have my arms kind of bent at 90 degrees going into the arms so my forearms would be in the upper arm area, so that way I could make the chest wider, and then have the lower arms on some kind of wire system connected to my hands
as for grimlock I was thinking of that for the legs, but it still leaves the problem of what to do with my waist area, I could just make the legs really long, but I don't know if that would work
Polystyrene sheets and cardboard is what I used on my last costume and it turned out quite nice, I've been thinking about getting into fiberglass, but I'm nervous about working with it
Last edited by DancinFool, 4/19/2004, 10:40 pm
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4/19/2004, 8:12 am
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TFCosplay
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Re: Devastator and Grimlock
The wired-hands idea should be do-able for Devastator. I think similar ideas are used on the larger animatronic outfits for TV and film. About the only disadvantage is that you won't have tactile feedback on the hands, which means that trying to pick something up or have any kind of fine grip control will be difficult. Still, if you only need the hands for emoting - waving fists around, flexing etc - it should work great. (Sudden thought - the grip issue could be resolved by adding some kind of flexible pads to the palm and fingers.) Are you thinking of wires to a ring on each finger, plus springs to pull them to the open position by default?
Hmm, as a plus, routing the hand controls through five lengths of wire (plus perhaps something for wrist control if you feel inclined) gives you a lot of design freedom on the lower arms and hands of the costume, as they don't have to cover up the arms of the operator. Plus similar bonuses to foot design - you could actually have a lot of space in the right foot.
I'm curious about how you're going to control the costume's elbows. Will they take their cues from your wrists, or some other source? I don't know how animatronics studios handle this when they don't have a puppeteer remote-controlling it from ten feet away.
What kind of dimensions do you think it'll end up being? Devastator was notorious for asymmetrical kibble long before Transmetals and RiD dabbled with it. Scavenger's shovel, Hook's crane boom, plus the costume stilts are all going to make this one chunky hunk of attire. But hey, it's the Green Machine. Big is kind of his trademark.
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Grimlock, now - yeah, I can see your point about the waist. The main dino body section is really only the robot chest. The abdomen and waist areas are lengthened in the cartoon and comic, and compressed in the toy so they can be covered up by the robot's lower legs. However, short of wearing twelve-inch platform shoes (or stilts) inside the costume, it won't work.
I suppose one possibility might be to artificially lengthen the torso block when converting to dino mode, to take up the gap between it and the dinoboots. If the torso block was slightly wider and deeper than your actual chest, you could have thin grey styrene panels slide down from the bottom edge of the torso block.
I'd suggest doing this for the back and front, and having the side panels similarly slide out from the dinoboots - heck, you could probably hide a small aircraft in there. Make the panels detailed and curved just enough so that they blend into the rest of the costume, and have them hold together in dino mode with strip magnets or something. Like a weaker version of a refrigerator door, or those bathroom installations where it takes a bit of pressure to open the shower door.
If this sounds like a possibility, I'd guess that having the panels retract automatically when transforming to robot mode would be a bonus. Maybe springs or something to pull them in and stop them from falling out the bottom of the boots and torso block? The only question then is how to get them to extend outwards when shifting to dino mode.
My initial instinct is to rig something inside the boots (lots of room). It could be triggered mechanically by the knees becoming fully bent (and powered by springs and upper leg muscles), or electronically through a glove control (if you prefer using electrics). The advantage of electronics in this case is that the torso plates could then be controlled directly by the same sequence, whereas a purely mechanical system would need some kind of mechanism to pull the front and back plates into place and hold them there.
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TFCosplay: Transform yourself
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4/21/2004, 6:16 pm
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DancinFool
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
Wow, those are some great ideas for grimlock, as soon as school gets out I'll have to start designing some of the possibilities.
As for devastator, yeah I was thinking of some kind of springs to have it at open position by default, I'm not sure for the elbows maybe have something rigged to my elbows so when I move them up it will bend them. Cause I'll kind of have them bent like that inside so if I move them up I could have a wire system with pulleys and a simple gear setup to have them rotate the elbows.
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Yeah this will be one huge costume, I'll have to pick a costume contest with doors big enough to fit through, plus the regular polystyrene and paper mache construction method won't work so I was thinking of building it out of plastic piping with polystyrene over top and then maybe paper mache or if I'm brave fiberglass.
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4/26/2004, 12:45 am
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DancinFool
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Re: transformers halloween costumes
__o__
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.../.\..
that's what the above should have looked like haha^
I have some pics of my soundwave costume I'm hosting locally.
http://24.86.66.250/images/soundwave3.jpg
http://24.86.66.250/images/soundwave2.jpg
http://24.86.66.250/images/soundwave01.jpg
Last edited by DancinFool, 4/26/2004, 5:30 am
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4/26/2004, 1:29 am
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TFCosplay
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Re: Soundwave pics
Dang, nice work. To quote Blackarachnia, "Not too shabby."
Although I now have an overpowering urge to suggest a strip of translucent red plastic covering the eyes. Maybe with LEDs along the edges so that it glows in the dark, like Kevin Kelm's wolfmech control panels.
May I use those links in the May edition of TFCosplay? If the images are likely to be moved somewhere else, I'll hold off.
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TFCosplay - transform yourself
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4/26/2004, 2:46 am
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