Knowing how to make armor from a lightweight material is a helpful skill to have in your cosplay arsenal. Wonderflex is suited for the task since it’s durable, light, and makes a great base. Instructables user volpin is a fan of Wonderflex and has created a detailed, 19 step tutorial to introduce beginners to the material and illustrate how it can be used for body armor. He used Wonderflex and Apoxie to make all of the armor parts in the above image, except for the helmet.
Some basics on patterning the armor:
A solid project always starts with solid blueprints. There are numerous ways to go about getting these, and with videogames being 3D modeled in the first place, a savvy builder can extract game files into 3D models which can be manipulated in a ton of programs…
I have a duct tape mannequin I made of my torso which makes projects like this much, much easier to work on. After printing out a set of armor templates, I’d loosely tape the parts together onto the form to approximate the shape of the armor. If pieces needed to be adjusted, I’d make alterations to the pattern, then print out a new piece.
Paper is a good analog for Wonderflex. While Wonderflex can take some gradual compound curves, it generally doesn’t like to make any sort of “dome” type shape without darting or trimming it in order to do so. In the first photo, you can see how the seam line in the middle of the chest allows an outward compound curve, since the two facing edges are convex shapes. If you can build elements like these into your patterns, you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration when trying to shape the Wonderflex later on.
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