Kaiju Suit Project - Zinogre (NEAR COMPLETION!)
Hello! I'm Adam, the midwestern power company employee who draws and
builds monster suits in his spare time. I should have taken the Monster
Suit Fabrication Course before I started work on my first build, it
would have taken a lot of the fumbling and guesswork out of Baragon's
construction and probably saved me a few hundred bucks of foam and quite
a few man-hours.
After building a Baragon suit for the 2016 convention season (ConCoction, G-Fest, Cuyahoga Comic-Con, Akron Comic-Con), I wanted to move on to a new monster--Zinogre (Jin'oga), the thunder wolf wyvern from the Monster Hunter series. The thought popped into my head--what if Monster Hunter was a bit more like the Ultra-series? It would save me and my spotters from having to deal with a quadsuit...
I'll do my best to maintain running updates on this thread as I finish up the art and wrangle foam and fabric.
Derived From:
http://monsterhunter.wikia.com/wiki/Zinogre
Concept Art:
http://i.imgur.com/M76zSfI.png
Operating Conditions:
This suit will be deployed as a con hall floor costume with support from one or two spotters. Puppeteering is limited to unjamming stuck jaws and keeping the tail from destroying vendor tables/snagging on things. Field maintainability is paramount, so the suit will be covered in vinyl (claws, spikes, possibly plating and the underside of the tail), faux fur (furred areas) and polyfleece (most of the suit).
Desired Features:
-Primarily soft/flexible internal structure (I tripped and fell at G-Fest.)
-Moving Jaw
-Neck Vision design
-Phase-change cooling vest (implemented, will be tested in Baragon during fall conventions)
-Backlit resin eyes
-Head fan
-Sound effects or amplifier. (Me: "Mfff mfff mmm!" Spotter: "What?")
-Possibly fiber optics in the fur or a bit of EL wire on the plating edges for that extra something.
-Airbrush detailing
-Dimensional paint detailing
Progress so far (9/19/2016):
http://i.imgur.com/QoDzEPe.png (without spikes and plating)
http://i.imgur.com/eOfbj6g.png (with spikes and plating)
I'd like a bit of feedback on these sketches, I'm thinking about doing one more pass before I clean up the sketch and put some lines on it to make a nice clear black-and-white print I can enlarge and tape together.
After building a Baragon suit for the 2016 convention season (ConCoction, G-Fest, Cuyahoga Comic-Con, Akron Comic-Con), I wanted to move on to a new monster--Zinogre (Jin'oga), the thunder wolf wyvern from the Monster Hunter series. The thought popped into my head--what if Monster Hunter was a bit more like the Ultra-series? It would save me and my spotters from having to deal with a quadsuit...
I'll do my best to maintain running updates on this thread as I finish up the art and wrangle foam and fabric.
Derived From:
http://monsterhunter.wikia.com/wiki/Zinogre
Concept Art:
http://i.imgur.com/M76zSfI.png
Operating Conditions:
This suit will be deployed as a con hall floor costume with support from one or two spotters. Puppeteering is limited to unjamming stuck jaws and keeping the tail from destroying vendor tables/snagging on things. Field maintainability is paramount, so the suit will be covered in vinyl (claws, spikes, possibly plating and the underside of the tail), faux fur (furred areas) and polyfleece (most of the suit).
Desired Features:
-Primarily soft/flexible internal structure (I tripped and fell at G-Fest.)
-Moving Jaw
-Neck Vision design
-Phase-change cooling vest (implemented, will be tested in Baragon during fall conventions)
-Backlit resin eyes
-Head fan
-Sound effects or amplifier. (Me: "Mfff mfff mmm!" Spotter: "What?")
-Possibly fiber optics in the fur or a bit of EL wire on the plating edges for that extra something.
-Airbrush detailing
-Dimensional paint detailing
Progress so far (9/19/2016):
http://i.imgur.com/QoDzEPe.png (without spikes and plating)
http://i.imgur.com/eOfbj6g.png (with spikes and plating)
I'd like a bit of feedback on these sketches, I'm thinking about doing one more pass before I clean up the sketch and put some lines on it to make a nice clear black-and-white print I can enlarge and tape together.
Post edited by Adam Shands on
2
Comments
/Chris
/Chris
Looks like a great framework!
/Chris
"Get Me Redesign!"
My ambitions got the better of me, and it took a few rounds of rubber duck debugging with my parents in order to realize that no, Zinogre as currently planned is not road-mobile. There's no way he'll fit in my car or mom's car, and having to rent a van whenever I deal with the suit is the definition of impracticality. So it's for the best that I get the mourning over with, tip the template frame into the dumpster, and and start sketching again.
It looks like the L200 bodypod technique is out of the question. That leaves us with the form-fitting muscle suit design...which is going to have somewhat more anthropomorphic results. On the plus side, it will be a lot more portable and much more nimble...and possibly will serve as the other half of the prototype for Ori.
In a nutshell, it looks like the Zinogre suit will be a bit more anthropomorphic and closer to BirdBark's conception of the design. Which actually looks pretty good the more I think about it...
Making sure a project fits out your door, into a vehicle, and into a location you want to use/display it can be a real challenge for bigger projects.
I always try and make things modular so they can be broken down into smaller pieces for transport or storage. The key there is finding hard lines on the project where it could be broken down, as trying to hide joining parts (without fur or wardrobe to cover it) can be difficult.
I'm curious to see how you tackle that challenge. I'm sure you'll come up with something!
/Chris
I ended up putting the suit on a drastic diet since I'm not too certain of being able to reliably break the suit down. Here's a rough idea of what the suit will look like from the side view.
/Chris
Overlay View:
Comparison (with old outline in gray):
Well, I'm off to watch the muscle and creature tutorials, pick up a few books from the library, plan out the musculature, and repair my duct tape dummy.
I'll try to get plastic sheeting on this and start work on the pattern pieces in the near future.
Attempt #1 & #2
(#1, Left) Too rough, too large, loss of detail. Needed to use more pattern segments.
(#2, Right) Also too rough, overly large, and I made the mistake of beveling the edges. Experimented with making the shoulder a pauldron.
Attempt #3
(not photographed)
Tried cutting down the pattern by the thickness (1") of the material. Far too small, shoulder turned out misshapen.
Attempt #4
Slightly too small, darted a little too far and ended up with pointy spots, darted the shoulder too closely instead of making it out of separate gores. I'll just carve shoulders out of the thick block of foam once I build the torso later this month.
I could use some help with this. Why can't I seem to get things to come out right? I've managed to get the pattern nice and tight..
/Chris
Well, I got a lot of things done this week. Not quite as much as I hoped, but I have a bunch of limbs and an upper torso sitting in my living room. I'm not at the point where things are ready to be covered and hung off of the diveskin, but I thought that I'd throw together all of the components I have at this point to see what they look like.
The Hard Upper Torso (HUT) was inspired by the spacesuit component of the same name. The profile of the monster's chest is too large to accommodate with the more compact ribcage from the muscle suit tutorial, so I had to pattern and fabricate it.
Next up will be the tail (I'm trying to build a soft-structure version of this, based on a strip of 1/4" L200), carved shoulders as per the muscle suit tutorial, and lower torso. The fat bag will probably be separated into four pieces so it just isn't a big lump.
i will follow this
Here we have a hasty artist's impression of the unfinished portions of the suit. It looks like it's going to end up being somewhat of a compromise between the v4 and v6 designs in size. As long as it fits out of the door and into the back of Red Midget...
I'm going to see about using whopper poppers to hold the hard upper torso closed/aligned. Extra support for that area will be provided by the second skin's zipper.
/Chris
I finished covering and attaching some of the suit components these past few weeks. Pictures courtesy of a close friend.
Next time--elastic adjustments, torso components, and tail. The substation on the north coast awaits me, however, so I probably won't be doing another post again until early late July.
Current progress:
Tails, Torsos, and Back to the Patterning Board
I finally figured out how to make a tail that wouldn't drag, and it sits on a plate of L200 with belt loops barged onto it.
In addition, I took a stab at building a torso bag. Unfortunately, I patterned too generously. At least the concept of subdividing it worked out and it's really flexible...
The upper torso still doesn't fit quite right, I'm going to take a few inches off the back and try to spread the sides out more So much for my buttressing work.
Bonus:
This would have been great when I built the Baragon suit back in '16...
/Chris
Flexible Neck
Eyes
I will start on the second skin this weekend after a short stand-down to clean things up and fix a few dropped stitches. Maybe this thing will be done by Cleveland Comic Con in March...
With that, the second skin is done. I need to pull one ring out of the neck, though, there's a bit too much slack and the segments have bunched up.
T-minus one month. This has to be ready to bundle into Red Midget II the morning of March 3rd, 2018.
The clock, oh the clock, it is ticking. The deadline is the evening of March 2nd.
Maybe I can manage that June deadline...