How to make a low-cost Master Chief costume

Here's how I made my final school sports carnival costume: the Master Chief.

This costume was low-cost, (reasonably) low effort and time and low quality. I made it for the athletics carnival and all that was left in good condition by the end of the day was the helmet.

The cardboard cost me ~$40 but it could probably be acquired cheaper, or white cardboard could be used and painted.

The costume is made primarily of folded cardboard and hot glue. The undersuit is a wetsuit and the visor uses laminated cellophane.

Apologies for the sideways photos, the computer kept the rotation EXIF data but instructables didn't.

Step 1 Pepakura

The program I used to print the armour layout is called Pepakura.

There are 2 programs, Pepakura Viewer and Pepakura Designer. Pepakura viewer is used to view pep files and Designer is used to edit them. Chances are you'll need to edit them so download Pepakura Designer (Windows only, and I had trouble using it with the Mac version of WINE.)

The demo version of Designer has the limitation that it can't save changes, so you'll have to set it up and print straight away. In my case i installed PDFCreator, a virtual PDF printer, since my virtual machine couldn't connect directly to a printer, and I needed to create a file which could be shared to the Mac for print.

You'll also need the Halo Pepakura files.

This page has a database of them. I used ROBOGENESIS' Mark VI parts with a different helmet. ROBOGENESIS' ones have the advantage that they are easier to scale.

Comments

[mr.incredible]

While I was looking through this, I was thinking it would be cool to make this out of fun foam. you can buy in sheets. It might be a little expensive, but it would last longer.

[furnissb]

:) wow good work........ if only i could sit down long enough to wright an instructable