Monster Musume Rachnera Cosplay making of – Part 5

Sitting on a spider

So we had the spider’s body holding by itself on its legs. That was very encouraging. And we had figured out a solution to the assembling/disassembling problem.  This step was certainly the most complicated step from the whole building process and we were released that it was done. However, more challenges were waiting for us.

One of the questions that people asked me the most was: ‘Where are you gonna put your legs? Will they be hidden inside the spider’s body?’ On some of the drawings, you can see that the human part of Rachnera is attached to her spider body in a way that we couldn’t reproduce.

Even if my legs would have been hidden inside the body, there’s no way I could have kept my body in that angle for many hours in a row during the convention. The only logical solution was to have me sitting on the body. But what would we do with my legs? When you look closely at other Rachnera pics, you can see that she does have shorter  ‘legs’ that are actually called ‘pedipalps.’

We thought that the best solution was to disguise my legs as the spider’s pedipalps.  Making latex leggings for the costume would make my legs look as slick and shiny as the fiberglass spider body that would be shiny because of the automotive paint. The latex would imitate the spider’s ‘skin texture’ perfectly.  But how would we integrate my feet in the pedipalps design?  I tried various pointy high heel shoes, but it would always, in the end, look like shoes. It would have been disapointing to work that much on a fiberglass body to finally wear my Rachnera costume with simple shoes.  So my friend and I built these fiberglass leg pieces that would cover my feet and give them a different shape.  Of course, my legs would remain longer than Rachnera’s pedipalps, but at least, they would be covered by the same material than the rest of the structure, creating a camouflage effect.

Now that we knew that my legs wouldn’t be hidden inside the body and that I would be sitting on the body, we had to build my seat.  It would be easy to create a fiberglass seat that would be part of the structure itself.  However, it had to be a comfortable seat because I would have to stay there for a long time.  Fiberglass remains fiberglass, not very comfortable, so the least we could do was to make sure that the seat would be… sculpted to fit my booty.  I thought of older tractor seats.  They had type of an ‘ergonomic’ shape.  Remember that box containing the metal plate where the legs would be boalted? We cut a ‘seat’ shape in that box and sculpted a styrene lid.  I would literally be sitting on the lid of the box giving us access to the legs’ assembling mechanism.  On the next picture, notice the boalts coming out from under the seat, where the legs are fixed.

Then I tried to sit on our first attempt of seat.  Since my legs were dangling off the edge, I had to hold my body to keep my balance. Otherway, I would fall down. It was clear that I couldn’t force my back and thighs muscles like this for many hours. We had to find a way to support me, to keep me on the seat.  So we added that ‘bump’ in the middle front of the seat to support my crotch and keep my body in balance.  It helped a lot.  Plus, that part of the seat would be hidden by Rachnera’s loincloth. It was a good idea.  But I still had to force my thighs muscles because the weight of my legs dangling off the edge of the seat was still pushing me down, making the under part of my thighs pressing very hard against the seat.  After a couple of minutes, my thighs were numb already.  And I wasn’t even wearing the fiberglass leg pieces that would add even more weight on my legs. That  seat was far from being comfortable. That would be a bigger challenge than we had thought.

I suggested to add something on the front of the seat to support my legs as much as possible.  We added 2 pads of EVA foam that we covered with fiberglass and integrated to the seat.  If you look closely to the next picture, you’ll see these 2 little shapes in the front of the seat that we designed expressly to support my thighs. It wasn’t perfect, but I felt like it was as close as it could get to a ‘comfortable’ seat. We sanded and finished the edge of the seat so it wouldn’t hurt me.  If we would have been building this for another model or cosplayer, I don’t think we coud have expected another girl to sit on this for a long time without feeling pain.  But since we were building it for me and since I’m pretty resistant to muscle pain, I knew that I could stand it for the time of the convention. Anyway, we had to move on and we had no other choice.  I would sit there and stay there no matter what.

See the window wall on picture? Just so you know, that’s where my sewing room is.  My sewing room is on the mezzanine floor in my workshop. Thanks to the window wall, when it’s summer time and when I work with the garage door of the workshop open, I can see outside even if I’m working in my sewing room. I love it!

Enough for today! Be ready for Part 6 of my making of blog! I’ll explain how the legs’  assembling mechanism was hidden by an intricate custom made lid.

Monster Musume Rachnera Cosplay Making Of – Part 4

Rachnera’s legs: the magical assembling process

I’m showing you that picture of the spider’s body again because there are other details I want to point out.

You can see that we had started applying batches of auto body filler all over the spider’s body. Experts will apply it more evenly. I do my best, but some intricate shapes are harder for me to cover evenly.  The more little bumps, the more sanding I’m gonna have to do. At least, auto body filler is easy to sand.  Easier than fiberglass. To apply body filler, I use a large variety of spatulas: rubber ones, plastic ones, metallic ones.

You can also notice a large metallic plate that comes out from the spider’s body and continues on the half sphere shape which is the front part of the body.  The holes in that plate are where the legs will be boalted. Another half sphere fiberglass shape will be assembled there to cover and hide the top part of the legs.  This second half sphere is removable because we need to have access to the legs to assemble and disassemble them.  Now you can see that the 8 legs will come from the front part of the spider’s body.  The biggest part of the body has no leg under it to support it.  Just like a real spider.  Which means that we needed the metallic support in the 4 big legs to be very strong.

For the 4 bigger legs, we used a gigantic round tubing, 3’’ of diameter, 1/8’’ of thickness.  It was probably way more than necessary, but since I would spend hours sitting on that structure, and since the 4 legs had to support all the weight of the spider’s body, we wanted to make sure that it would be super strong. The round tubings were bended and welded to follow the shape of the bigger legs.  You can see on the next picture how the tubing follows the shape of the original template and of the final fiberglass leg.

Wait. Yes, the leg is covered with fiberglass and the metallic structure is outside. Right.  To insert the metallic structure inside the big legs, we had to cut them in halves with a buffer (which means fiberglass dust, awful step) and to take off the styrene and MDF template from the legs to keep only the empty fiberglass shell.  Then we could put the round tubing inside and we patched the legs together again using the same method explained in my previous blog (see Part 3.)

Let’s take a look at the spider’s body holding on the 4 metallic tubings.  Before going through the whole process of inserting the metallic tubings inside the legs, we wanted to make sure that they would really support the body.  It worked well.  Notice how the legs come out from the front part of the body. And notice how the spider’s belly was well sanded at that point. :)  From sanders to single sanding paper sheets, anything you can think of that was created to sand, we used it.  And we sanded a lot.

We were in the process of developing a concept that would allow us to lift up the spider’s body and install the legs.  That body, even empty, was way too heavy to be held in the air by a few people while someone else would install the legs.  Plus, its round shape was making it very hard to manipulate. And we knew that we couldn’t count on a 15 people team to help us installing the spider at the booth before Anime Expo. My friend and I really had to create a concept that would make the assembling and disassembling process doable by 2-3 people.

The most obvious way was to use the already existing metallic plate hidden in the spider’s belly, where the legs are boalted, as a part of our assembling/disassembling structure.  There are 8 holes in the plate, one for each leg, and we used these holes to temporary fix the removable sturcture that would allow us to fix the spider’s body in its transportation box and to lift it up to assemble the legs.  I’m skipping a couple of steps there, because it was later in the finishing sanding process, but I want you to notice, on the next picture, the metallic structures on the floor.

Before any of you make any comment about the fact that I’m not wearing a dust paper mask while sanding, please read Part 1 of this blog.

As it is on the picture, the metallic folded triangle and the metallic piece coming out from the spider’s tail allowed us to boalt the spider’s body to the bottom of its transportation box.  See how we boalted it to the floor while we were sanding it. It was fixed the same way in the transportation box. To assemble the legs to the body, we had planned to take off the walls of the box and to let the tail of the spider boalted to the bottom of the box.  We would then unfold the front part of the metallic structure, the triangle part, which would lift up the front part of the spider’s body, allowing us to fix the 2 first big legs. (I’ll share a picture of that step later, while I was actually installing the spider before Anime Expo.)  Then, we could unboalt the tail from the bottom of the box, take off the metallic triangle from the front of the spider and fix it to the little part coming out from the tail, which would allow us to lift ut the back part of the spider’s body. At that point, the front of the body would hold on the front legs and the back, on the triangle metallic structure.  We would then be able to boalt the 2 back legs, take off definitely the assembling structure pieces and fix the 4 remaining legs.  It was a real engineering challenge to develope that process and when I think about it, I can’t believe that without any official engineering knowledge, we came up with that idea. And most importantly, I’m impressed that it actually worked. It was so much improvisation, but we had no choice, it had to work.

We’re getting closer and closer to see Rachnera alive! Watch for Part 5 of my blog to learn more!

Monster Musume Rachnera Cosplay Making Of Blog – Part 3

Body filler and patience: how to make fiberglass feel and look as slick as glass

After the legs, we covered the spider’s body with fiberglass.  Since the body was so big, we could use big squares of fiberglass mat instead of small pieces. However, the bigger the fiberglass mat pieces are, the more chances you have that there might be air bubbles trapped between the layers.  To avoid air bubbles, you can use that metallic roller that has the shape of a paint roller without the sleeve.  You roll it over the soaked fiberglass mat or cloth and then you make sure that all the air bubbles will go away.  Covering the back of the spider’s body was pretty fast.  Covering it’s belly was way longer.  Rachnera has kind of a large textured stripped pattern on her belly that was very long to cover with fiberglass, but mostly, it was long to finish with body filler and to sand. On the next picture, you’ll see the spider’s body on its back.  The part on the top is its belly.

The amber colored thing is fiberglass. It has the color of the polyester resin I use.  This is how fiberglass looks like before the finishing process. The blue product is the auto body filler.  Body filler exists in many colors. It takes  the color of the hardener you mix with it.  There are different types of auto body filler. Some very rough body filler can be used to correct the shape of a fiberglass object and to fill up the fiberglass cloth texture.  Very fine body filler with a super slick texture is used at the end for the finishing sanding to fill up small holes.  The last, tiny holes will be filled up with the primer coat.

As I said, before you apply body filler, you can see all the texture of the fiberglass mat or cloth.  If you want fiberglass to be as slick as glass and to have its famous shiny look that we love so much, you have to cover it with body filler and to sand it a lot. You don’t want to sand fiberglass.  You want to sand body filler. Fiberglass dust is what is so itchy. Whenever you need to cut or buff a part of fiberglass, that dust is THE worst part of working with fiberglass.  Fiberglass dust goes everywhere:  on your clothes, on your skin and it itches so much that you wish you could rip off your own skin to stop it from itching.  Water won’t completely remove the dust from your skin.  Hot showers make it worst. It’s recommended to take a cold shower and to use a washcloth to wash your skin when you have fiberglass dust on you. That’s why you have to wear long clothes to protect your skin when you work with fiberglass.  I’ve seen guys using tape around their wrists to fix their sleeves to their gloves  in order to keep fiberglass dust from entering inside their shirt. Yes, it’s that bad. As much as you can, avoid to sand or buff fiberglass.  Add an even coat of body filler everywhere and sand the body filler.  Since I’m not a fan of cold showers, I always wear long sleeves when I work with fiberglass. Loose clothes are also more comfortable, because they don’t touch your skin and then you feel less the fiberglass dust that went on your skin.  I just bought a product called ‘liquid gloves’ that is kind of a cream that you put on your hands and arms and that is supposed to create a layer that will protect your skin from paint and fiberglass. I’ll certainly try this product during my next fiberglass projet. Also, no need to repeat that wherener you’re using polyester resin and fiberglass, you have to wear a respirator mask.

Like a glass snowball

Speaking of fiberglass dust… We were concerned about the total weight of the spider.  Weight influences the transportation fees and we wanted to make sure that it would be as cheap as possible for our clients, Ninja Division and Seven Seas Entertainment.  What could we possibly do to take off some weight?  We could empty the spider’s body and take off the styrene.  Plus, we knew that we would have to assemble the spider by ourselves before Anime Expo. So we had to figure out a way to lift that big body and install the legs. The body would better be as light as possible. We definitely had to take off the styrene inside.  Yes, styrene is light, but in such a big quantity, it becomes surprisingly heavy.

I remember when we were building Lug the robot.  It took 4 bundles of 12 4’ X 8’ sheets of styrene to sculpt the whole robot. Some of you may remember that picture of me where I was making snow angels in sterene.  There was styrene everywhere in the workshop. 48 sheets of styrene granules that I had to clean up even months after the robot was finished.  That’s why I wasn’t so enthusiastic about taking off the styrene from the spider’s body, but I knew it wouldn’t be worst than the robot.

So we cut a hole in the spider’s body with a buffer (which is a good example of a step that produces fiberglass dust… itchy, so itchy.) You can see on the next picture the stacked sheets of sterene inside the fiberglass body.

Then we took off all the styrene. It came out in bits and small pieces. It really took a while.  And once again, there was styrene everywhere in the workshop, making it look like a glass snowball. Can’t remember how many garbage bags I filled up with all that styrene. Sorry, environment.

Now you can admire the empty fiberglass body. Notice how aluminium foil, that we had glued on styrene to protect it from polyester resin, stayed in the bottom of the fiberglass shell. It’s not important and doesn’t change anything since it’s hidden inside. It can stay there, it has no consequence. You have certainly also noticed a square tubing that crosses the spider’s body. It was welded on the other side to the metallic plate where the spider’s legs would be boalted.  You can see it on the first picture of this part of the blog.  Since that plate, located in the front part of the spider’s body, would support the whole weight of the body, we wanted to make sure that the plate wouldn’t come out from the body because of all that pressure.  So we fixed the square tubing inside the body with more fiberglass.  I’ll explain later how the legs were installed under the body.

Now that the body was empty, the last step was to put back the fiberglass piece that we had temporary removed.  One of the only good sides of fibergalss is that it can be cut and patched as many times as you want and at the end, if you do a good job, it will not show. See how we put back the piece at its place, following the little notches we had made.  We had to buff around the hole to make the surface lower in order to allow us to apply more fiberglass mat to hide the opening. If we would have only added more fiberglass mat on top of everything, we would have created a bump all around our piece that we are actually trying to hide. At the end, body filler will cover everything and you won’t be able to tell that there was once a hole there.

More body filler fun in Part 4 of my blog! And you’ll also discover how the spider’s legs were fixed to its body.

Monster Musume Rachnera Cosplay Making Of – Part 2

NOTE: Before any of you ask, I’ll explain something one more time and I think I’m gonna copy/paste this at the beginning of each part of this blog. I’m not using a dust paper mask on the work in progress pics because wearing various masks irritates the skin of my face and gives me blemishes. The only fact of breathing in the humidity of my own breath in those masks makes my skin look bad. Then I can have a convention, a photoshoot or an interview and I have to wear more makeup to hide the blemishes, which isn’t good for my skin either. There are the masks for chemicals that I absolutely have to wear when I’m working with polyester resin or automotive paint. So when it comes to dust, I give my skin a break and I don’t wear a paper mask. I know it’s not the healthier choice, but most of models are usually not fiberglass technicians. I have to deal with two jobs that don’t go well together. So I make the choice, as sad as it is, not to wear paper masks to allow my skin to survive. But I do wear a mask for chemicals and vapors when I use polyester resin and automotive paint.

Sculpting styrene legs on a MDF frame guide

We had one big and one small MDF leg shape already cut. We needed 3 more of each, so we cut them.  We glued  styrene on each side of each MDF template and sculpted by hand each of the 8 legs.  That step wasn’t too bad.  It’s the finishing process, when we would later cover everything with fiberglass and try to make our 8 handmade legs look the same, that would be more complicated… Yes, we should have made molds.

We had decided at this point that we wanted some of Rachnera’s legs to hold in the air, instead of having her 8 legs touching the ground, to make her pose look more dynamic.  We figured out that with the proper internal metallic structure, Rachnera could hold on her 4 bigger legs (front and back legs) and that the 4 smaller middle ones would be like a ‘decoration’ or not necessary for the structure to hold.  I’ll come back later to the metallic structure, how it was integrated in the legs and how it was fixed to the spider. But first, let’s talk about fiberglass.

What’s fiberglass?

Before I say anything else, remember that you’re gonna have to wear a respirator mask and long clothes when you’ll work with fiberglass.  You’ll understand why later.

When I started working with fiberglass, I didn’t know anything about it. I really learned everything from the beginning and I don’t consider myself an expert.  I will share with you what I know, but my explanations will be basic. They will be the explanations of someone whose speciality job isn’t fiberglass and whose mother tongue isn’t English. Just keep that in mind and don’t hesitate to write comments, give tips and advices if you know more. Your comments are always welcome. :)

The final surface that we call ‘fiberglass’ is obtained by mixing fiberglass itself with a resin. If I understood correctly, the proper translation in English to talk about fiberglass would be fiberglass cloth (which would be the woven one) and fiberglass mat (which would be the agglomerated one. If I’m wrong, please write the correct translation in the comments.) In both cases, it looks like a shiny, white piece of fabric, it’s sold in rolls and it’s available in various thicknesses.  Woven fiberglass works well when you want to cover a plain surface, like a floor or a roof. (Yes, apparently they make industrial floors and roofs in fiberglass. I didn’t know.)  Agglomerated fiberglass mat is useful when you want to cover an intricate shape. You can tear small pieces of fiberglass mat and cover any type of shape by layering all these pieces of fiberglass mat all over the shape you’re covering.  In any case, fiberglass has to be soaked with resin.  I have always used polyester resin because it’s cheap and it catalyzes fast.  However, polyester resin is a strong chemical product, it smells horrible and it’s toxic. You absolutely need to wear a respirator mask to work with polyester resin and you can’t use it in your house. You need a workshop or you have to use it outside if you can.  To clean up polyester resin, if you want to use your brush more than once or if you have polyester resin on your hands, you’ll need acetone. Another product that you should never put on your skin.  :S You’ll need gloves all the time. (I always use nitrile gloves instead of latex gloves because latex gloves, used to make silicone molds, can keep some silicone, like Smooth-On Rebound 25, to catalize properly. For that reason, latex gloves are prohibited in my workshop. I take no chance and use only nitrile gloves to do everything.) The polyester resin I use has a pinkish color that changes for an amber color when I mix it up with its catalysis.  Without catalysis, the resin itself is a liquid.  With the catalysis, it hardens. A piece made of polyester resin alone could break if you would drop it on the floor.  Fiberglass mat or cloth is what gives the final piece its strenght.

There’s also shredded or chopped fiberglass.  It’s applied and mixed up with resin using an air powered fiberglass spray gun or chopper gun system that throws both the chopped fiberglass and the resin at the same time. That professional equipment is used in industry to make fiberglass bathtubs, showers, boats, pools, etc.  Let’s take for example a fiberglass bathtub. They will apply in the bathtub’s mold coats of gelcoat, then they will apply the chopped fiberglass and resin in the mold using the fiberglass spray gun.  The part of the bathtub in which we sit will have a slick finish (the gelcoat) and the hidden part of the bathtub will have the rough texture of the chopped fiberglass.  If you Google all this, you will easily find videos showing that process. My guess is that we might have used a fiberglass spraygun to cover the robot and spider.  However, the price of that equipment alone would have taken part of our budget and since I don’t plan to become an official fiberglass shop, it’s not worthed investing in that.  Big styrene statues or structures can also be covered with sprayable liquid plastics that can be painted.  Various products exist.  I didn’t know these products at that time, though. So my friend and I used what we knew and covered the robot and spider by hand, using pieces of fiberglass mat soaked in polyester resin.

Polyester resin applied on styrene makes it melt like snow in the sun.  Don’t you ever sculpt styrene and apply polyester resin on your sculpture, you’ll destroy it.  Styrene has to be protected from polyester resin and after many tests and searches, we found out that the best, easiest and cheapest way was to use aluminum foil.   Just apply aluminum foil on your styrene structure using spray glue, make sure to put aluminum foil everywhere, cover all the styrene, and you’ll be good to go. We realized that aluminum tape works well too and is useful to cover small parts with a special shape.

On the next picture, you’ll see the spider’s body and legs that we have separately sculpted in styrene by hand.  You can see the MDF template in the middle of each leg.  We were at the step of covering everything with aluminum foil before starting to apply fiberglass and polyester resin. (Notice in the background the red stripe on the beige wall. That was the set we had built to shoot my Gunbuster cosplay. :) We would later paint that fake wall in grey to make another photoshoot.)

Once the whole styrene spider was covered with aluminum foil, we could start covering everything with polyester resin and fiberglass mat.  That is one of the 2 worst steps. Polyester resin not only stinks, it’s also a strong chemical product that obligates anybody using it to wear a respirator mask.  As I said, you also need to wear gloves. But it doesn’t take long before polyester resin makes the gloves ‘melt’ and you can feel, on the tip of your fingers, that the nitrile is reacting with the resin just before the glove rips.  And then acetone is the only dangerous friend that will take off the polyester resin from your  skin. No wonder why I never wear nailpolish when I’m in the middle of a big fiberglass project… You’ll need tons of gloves if you work with fiberglass. You’d better buy boxes of gloves.  At the end of the project, I was always wearing 2 pairs of gloves on top of each other.

I also wear gloves when I tear pieces of agglomerated fiberglass mat.  Because it itches. But it’s not the worst. Fiberglass dust is the worst. Before talking about this, let’s start with the first fiberglass step.  We always prepare in advance piles of little pieces of fiberglass mat that we tear by hand.  We make various sizes of pieces depending on what surface we have to cover. Then we put a piece of fiberglass mat on a flat surface and we use a brush to soak it with polyester resin.  The same brush is used to apply the soaked fiberglass mat piece on the surface to be covered.  You can reuse your brushes by keeping them in acetone in between the fiberglass coat applications.  However, you’ll still need tons of brushes.  I recommand to buy boxes of brushes too. And many gallons of acetone. On the next picture you can see the smaller spider’s legs covered with fiberglass.

As you can guess, it takes a lot of time to do things that way. It’s a very long process. You have certainly noticed the metallic structure of the smaller legs.  We used 1’’ X 1’’ steel square tubing that we fixed on the extremity of the 4 small MDF legs.  These tubings were welded in a particular position that would make the smaller legs hold more or less in the air.  As mentioned earlier, we wanted some of the middle legs to have a different position and to hold in the air instead of touching the ground. The square tubing parts would exceed the final fiberglass legs and be used to install the spider’s legs under its body with huge boalts.

More fiberglass fun in Part 3!