Cosplayer NealBomBad's astounding Cecil armor showcases an extremely interesting construction technique - 3D printing.  Neal's knowledge of 3DS Max, modeling skills, and plenty of patience lent to an amazing end product. Check out the photos below.

Who: The Character
Cecil Harvey - The protagonist of Final Fantasy IV. This is his Dark Knight version.

Why: The Decision
Final Fantasy II for Nintendo (originally Final Fantasy IV in Japan) had always been one of my favorite Final Fantasy games. Cecil Harvey was my favorite character in that game and when I saw the Cinematics in the Nintendo DS remake I had to make the costume. The design was so striking and memorable.

What: The Process
The costume took about 8 months to create. I first began with a human form that closely resembled me from a free software program called Make Human. Using the best reference images I could find I modeled each piece of armor in 3DS Max starting with low poly proxies and adding more level of details. I did not download files from a shareware site or any other source.

Next I printed the armor with my 3D printer. The material is ABS plastic. The software divides the imported model into layers .007 if an inch thick and prints the part one layer at a time. This costume was 64 prints and about 500 hours in print time.

The raw prints are somewhat rough and you can see the layers of plastic. I coated the parts with black abs glue found at any hardware store. This filled the gaps and made the parts stronger. The glue was sanded down to give each part a smooth finish. Then I primed, fixed spots, primed, sanded, painted and then finally clear coat.

The Eye on the sword, detailed accents and stripes were created in Photoshop and printed out on water decal paper and then applied.

The outer tan strapping was two pieces of Ultrasuede fused together (to add thickness and get the nap even on both sides), cut into strips and the braided together. The buckles they are attached to were also modeled and printed.

The eyes were silver sun glass lenses with white see-through fabric over them. The body suit was crafted by my mother and she also helped me with the interior strapping that holds the armor together

The costume took about 8 months to create. The most difficult part was figuring out how to attach all the armor to themselves and to the body suit.

Where and When: The Debut
I debuted the costume at NDK 2010. Most of my pictures are from Fanime 2011, though.

Links: The Cosplayer
You can find me on Cosplay.com and Acparadise.com.

The Gallery
Photos by Joseph Chi Lin, Judy Stephens, Cliff Nordman, Daniel Baker

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