Life-Sized Brute (Jiralhanae) Costume

[Dirtdives2424]

The Brute Shot looks tiny.........

 

[Saber]

The Brute Shot looks tiny.........

It is a little small.

The thing is, the Brute Shot was built way before the Brute and was intended for human use, so it was scaled down.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

It's like a hand gun now.....its so cute......

 

[Saber]

So on to one of the more detailed parts of the costume! the face!

I'm creating the head by sculpting it out of oil-based clay and then we will mold out of silicone and then make latex casts.

Casts are also available for sale, so please contact me if you're interested in purchasing a raw latex head!

We started off with a base foam made from EPS foam, a foam mannequin head, EVA foam border strips, and duct tape.

Then I drew on where I wanted details to start.

Then I used tin foil and duct tape to start the facial features.

 

[Saber]

And now for some clay!

Volde-brute. This is also when I found out I had the lip too low so I adjusted the clay shortly after this.

Lip has been raised and the nose sculpted. Still had some symmetry issues at first with the corners of the mouth, but it was fixed later.

We inserted some glass half circles into the sockets so I could sculpt the eyelids.

 

[TPceebee]

This is great! I bet you saved a lot of clay using duct tape and foam for the armature. This kind of technique will be really handy when I come to sculpting an elite head. I was wondering how I'd make my armature.

 

[Saber]

This is great! I bet you saved a lot of clay using duct tape and foam for the armature. This kind of technique will be really handy when I come to sculpting an elite head. I was wondering how I'd make my armature.

Yeah, it saved a lot of time and money. Granted, I still have a lot of clay up there, but it's still not nearly as much as if I tried to make the entire thing out of clay.

Glad I could be of some help!

Since this is only my third time ever sculpting anything out of clay, I still have a lot of learning to do.

But thanks to the internet, there's a lot that I can learn in a short amount of time, which is perfect for this project.

The toughest part was figuring out how to approach the skin texture. Brutes have a very Elephant-like hide, but I've also seen images where they have pores on their faces, so I experimented until I got a texture I was happy with.

"Oh, hey there..."

I made some teeth out of some oven bake clay too.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

Dude that is psychotic!!!!! Do you do this professionally?

 

[PaiganBoi]

Love the sculpting of the head. For your third time doing a sculpt, I'd say you have some natural talent.
I chuckled a bit at one point. before you added the teeth. It looked like the Brute had braces with the mouth slightly open and the foil of the armature exposed.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

It's very Orc looking.....from the back, it even looks Hulk-like. 3rd sculpt? WOW!!! looks more like 300th. You definitely know what you are doing.

 

[Saber]

Dude that is psychotic!!!!! Do you do this professionally?

No, I don't. But I appreciate your compliments!

Love the sculpting of the head. For your third time doing a sculpt, I'd say you have some natural talent.
I chuckled a bit at one point. before you added the teeth. It looked like the Brute had braces with the mouth slightly open and the foil of the armature exposed.

Thank you! I like to call my "natural talent" my obsession with getting details correct.

I laughed at the foil too. I was going to leave holes in the lips for the teeth to set in, but I decided that I wanted the lips to be whole and I can place the teeth later.

It's very Orc looking.....from the back, it even looks Hulk-like. 3rd sculpt? WOW!!! looks more like 300th. You definitely know what you are doing.

The Brute definitely looks non-Brute-ish from other angles, but once I get a cast of it and start putting hair on it, it'll start looking like the real thing in no time!

And thank you! Honestly, most of the things I do are by the seat of my pants. I never know what I'm doing half the time.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

Well I wish I had half of your "never knowing what your doing half of the time" talent. Now I'm assuming you are going to cast this..... That is one big piece to work on......Are you going to put any animatronics in to it to make it more lifelike? Blink.....mouth movement....ect..... Articulated hands? At least 1 .....the other will have to hold the BruteShot.

 

[Saber]

Well I wish I had half of your "never knowing what your doing half of the time" talent. Now I'm assuming you are going to cast this..... That is one big piece to work on......Are you going to put any animatronics in to it to make it more lifelike? Blink.....mouth movement....ect..... Articulated hands? At least 1 .....the other will have to hold the BruteShot.

Yep! We're making a mold of the head and we'll be casting out of latex.

For starters (and to get it done in time) we'll make the first head static so we at least have one presentable. But down the line, we actually plan to have multiple heads with different hairstyles, scars, etc. and we hope to learn how to create some animatronics to bring the face to life.

But for right now, we're just keeping it straight so we can get the rest of the costume done.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

Well you have my vote for the next player for a spot in Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge.

 

[TPceebee]

While Dirtdives mentions articulated hands, I'm interested in seeing how you handle the holding of the bruteshot. Are the wearers arms long enough to reach the ends of the hands, or will you use some kind of extension mechanism? How will they hold the weapon?

My personal plan for Arbiter is to create a structural hand that holds the weapon on its own and connect that to a trigger-like mechanism, kind of like a gimbal mechanism on performing dinosaur suits and how they control the head, that allows me to move the arm around without having to use my strength to hold up the arms and not drag the weapon around. Maybe its overkill, I dunno lol.

 

[Saber]

Well you have my vote for the next player for a spot in Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge.

Awww, thank you!

I don't know if I could ever do competition/ reality shows. They get really sketchy with the legal paperwork.

While Dirtdives mentions articulated hands, I'm interested in seeing how you handle the holding of the bruteshot. Are the wearers arms long enough to reach the ends of the hands, or will you use some kind of extension mechanism? How will they hold the weapon?

My personal plan for Arbiter is to create a structural hand that holds the weapon on its own and connect that to a trigger-like mechanism, kind of like a gimbal mechanism on performing dinosaur suits and how they control the head, that allows me to move the arm around without having to use my strength to hold up the arms and not drag the weapon around. Maybe its overkill, I dunno lol.

Down the line, we plan on having articulated hands. The mechanism we built for the arm was built so our wearer doesn't have to try to reach his arms all the way down to the wrists of the Brute in order to manipulate them. This is mostly due to the fact that Brutes' arms are ridiculously long and reaching that far would be physically impossible.

I can get some of the pictures of the mechanism off my phone in the next few days to show you how we tackled that mechanism.

As for the brute shot, we think that the one that we have might be a tad too heavy for the arms that we built so we may have it as just a back-mounted prop and have something lighter in the Brute's hand.

In the future, we want to make the fingers articulate and able to grasp things, but for now, we will make them static but with poseable fingers so we can still take some fun pictures.

 

[Saber]

The Brute head sculpt is finished and I got the silicone needed for molding the other day!

Molding day is tomorrow!

Here are some battle scars I added to the sculpt to give the Brute more character.

The belt is complete!

We foamed out the arms! The arms were tricky because we wanted them to be whole with no gaps, but it needed to be flexible enough to still bend when we worked the mechanism. But we figured it out!

And we've started working on the arm bands too!

 

[Saber]

It's pretty ridiculous that the Brute's bicep is wider than Gabe's entire torso.

Time to skin!
When we bought this giant roll of 1/4" upholstery foam, we made a wild guess that we would need about 10 yards of the stuff.
We could'nt have hit the nail on the head any harder! Woo!

And look at that flex!
So SWOL!

Even the bungies under the skin used to assist in moving the arms look like real tendons!

While we were working on the arms, we had a special guest stop by!
Andrew, DaFrontlineTrooper, himself!

He checked out our progress on the Brute and we had Jeremie put on the costume for him. We are getting soooo close!

We really appreciate all your support on this journey we're on. We still have a few more pictures yet to share and then we'll be fully caught up!

Please leave any feedback you may have! I like reading what you guys have to say!

Cheers.

 

[Dirtdives2424]

He's like a shy little kids wrapping arms around its mother's leg when being introduced to somebody new. So cute.........It is great that he stopped by.....So I'm assuming now that there will be some type of head harness to articulate the head a bit.......what about vision? I can barely see Jeremie's head through the top.

 

[PaiganBoi]

I was wondering the same thing. How will one see through the costume?
Poke some eyeholes through the chest?
I have seen Adam Savage use cameras on the outside of the costume and then have a phone or tablet on the inside as a way to see.