Dday

You are right about the spring providing the tension for the end cap. The end cap is locked in place by the clip on the bottom of the tube. You press it down and then you can push the cap in. If the clip is not pressed in there is a pin on the inside that stops the cap from being able to move.

I know nothing Brian Snow.

The costume guys probably had a massive budget for this film, considering who is backing it and how much they stand to make on the film. My guess without any real knowledge of their process is they did pretty much what Roy and I are doing. 3D modeled, likely 3d printed it on a big 3d printer, molded and cast it. Injection molding is indeed expensive and I think would not have been the route of choice for this. With short timelines and budgets and ease of doing, most will turn to resin casts that are painted with high gloss automotive paint. Most of the limitations are based on the side of printer you have. The bigger the plate and articulation is, the bigger items you can make. 3D printing is ok for the first piece but when you want to make 10 or 20 or more... the time involved in 3d printing right now is very high. In the time it takes to print one copy, I can take a master and get it molded and probably cast at least 1 copy. Then in the time they are printing the 2nd one, I can have 5 more cast.

the problem with the helmet as we have seen so far is that the design doesn't lend itself to thermoforming very well. It is a 1 piece design, so we think from what we have seen. This type of design has no way of being thermoformed in ABS. ABS can be used if you are 3D printing it but that is a completely different story. The differences in a thermoformed ABS helmet and a resin helmet will of course be weight and rigidity. The resin will be much heavier when compared to ABs but it will still be lightweight and not noticeable on your head. 2 kilos maybe (4.4lbs) Similar to a clone or any other similar sized helmet.

That is a good shot there of the suits. There is a lot of excess on the AM suits to account for all body shapes and sizes. The thing is to cut it where you want so that it can be in the right area for the back of the butt plate.

Brian, It is possible to 3D print the helmet in parts based on the 3D design that Roy is building up. Once he is finished with the 3D model, it can either be 3D printed or CNC machined out of a solid block of plastic. Both are similar but if it is 3D printed it will come in multiple parts which will have to be cleaned up, assembled and then molded. In a CNC situation, the entire thing is a single piece already assembled and parts ready for molding as it with very minimal cleanup. It is a more costly solution but I think it a better product which means a better casting. Once Roy and I get far enough to make the decision, he may offer the 3D files for sale for someone who wants to print their own instead of buying a resin version. That is a ways down the road once we're done with the masters. The OT was Asymmetrical, the PT was symmetrical and the ST is.... well we aren't 100% sure just yet. From the views we currently have the TK looks like a symmetrical helmet, but truly we have not seen anything but the left and about 1/4 of the rightside from extrapolation of the stills. They might still surprise us. There is a reason they have only shown us a single side of the helmet in the first helmet release as well as the trailer... We will have to wait for May the 4th to really find out I think.

So, I approached Roy Gilsing (Wannawanga on the FISD) (www.wannawanga.com) about doing some 3D design. We had a discussion around the Episode 7 Helmet and came to a partnership to produce these in and for the FISD community. So, Roy has been working hard around his normal job designing some awesome consumer and industrial products www.roygilsing.com to help provide us troopers some helmets. Once the design has been finished and vetted by all of us detail freaks here on the FISD, we will get the master CNC cut and I will then mold it in silicone. Once this is done, castings in resin and for sale here on the FISD! I will be updating the build as Roy creates the base model and through the physical build process. So without further ado, here is the first draft of the helmet. There are a LOT of things missing at the moment and some modifications have already been identified. I just wanted to put this up in the hopes that we can crowdsource the build a little, get the ideas of this great community and let you know that we are working on it! We are really waiting on more views of the helmet so we can get this right the first time, but in the mean time there is a lot of base work to be done. Please take the photo above with a little knowledge that it is a rough start and will be changing a lot as we work on it.

Looking good! With the E11 builds going around these days, I am super impressed with the innovations people are coming up with, and it just seems a shame to do all this awesome work and just to put it on a plastic base.

I believe that his torso and other pieces are slightly bigger then the TE line of armors.

Roy and I are pretty close to releasing a very rough V00.1 of the helmet model for the forum. We have a few details to work out before this, but we can make a lot of details so far based on existing photos and making a semi collage of them. This is still very speculative and the design will be refined through careful examination of the photos, constant tweaks, forum and FISD input as well as hopefully another trailer to be released... SOON (I hope, I need more SW DRANK!).

The original helmets are made in a 2 piece cap and back design. There is nothing in the CRLs specifying the requirement of 2 or 3 pieces, as long as the 3piece design is not apparent once built it should not be a problem. It is much easier to manufacture a 3 piece design.

In the first photo I posted a few back you can see what looks to be teeth in the frown, there are places where the dark is very dark and some where it is a little pixelated.

More then the general public has seen of high res screen grabs of other, cut and deleted scenes?! Well, I know you can't give us everything said in confidence but we will just have to wait and see. Maybe show her the photos above and see what she says. From these photos it is straight forward to see that they use a bubble or rather at least that the lenses are separate at least externally. Maybe on the inside they are connected? Details are required! Hahah

From what we see on the screen cap of the trailer it does indeed look like the lens extends really far towards the edge. Photo 1 lens area is too small, but the exact size is not 100% capturable yet until we see another angle. The reflection could be just the corner of the sunken area vs the edge of the lens. I agree, 2 separate bubble lenses.

Based on lightening of the photos it looks like the black part is painted black, and the lenses and eyes are similar to the normal TK. Not my photo.... ------------- and ------------ The last photo doesn't show as much detail, but with the color change you can see more details in the black. I'm really certain that the lenses are a single bubble hiding in the black and the whole black section is simple painted to give the perception of a single piece.

I would love to start a list, but at this point a list is pretty counter productive. it really locks in for a release date for the item, but since we do not have 100% view of the helmet yet, the timeline is unknown. Plus I have found when doing lists, about 25% of the people disappear and never reply once it's time to deposit. We are just going to keep information flowing and once we have some concrete things to show we will post it up to help generate the interest and keep people coming back. A list will follow once we have a finished 3D model and are ready to go into molding phases.

I will be focusing on a resin and fiberglass style cast helmet. It will come most likely as one piece (depending on the details for the left side). The style and details on the helmet do not lend to vacuforming very well, so I think this needs to be a resin cast helmet. The plan at the moment is to offer a unfinished kit that needs to be painted and detailed by you and also offering a painting service from a professional airbrusher. As for the suit, I will not be doing that, I will leave it to the existing vacuformers who have the skills and tools on hand to get the suits done.

None of the helmets available are actually accurate. The shape of the eyes lenses is wrong, and the small detailing on the helmets aren't right. Like the one you pictured above, the vents on the cheek are not evenly spaced and far to small, the detailing above the ear is wrong and it is missing a greeblie on the top of the helmet. The other one being openly offered is the same with some minor problems. My partner and I will be making a helmet offering, but we're purposely not cashing in on the early inaccurate craze. The 3d models are in the works now and being refined, but we will not finalize it and start molding it until we can be really certain to the minor details. We want it to be accurate from the start instead of forcing people to buy multiple versions.

This the the trailer as G. Lucas wanted to release it, but he will be sure to make it the edition a few years later to dump on our new dreams as well... since it is not our universe, but rather his.

SO MANY THREADS. I yelled, for real. Seriously though, it is about time to consolidate, it is hard keeping up at this point with the different threads, pick the most popular one and go with that.

My opinion is that the new blaster clips or is magnetically held onto the thigh.

I agree with you Gio, as long as it looks like it should on the outside, if we can make it better, lets do it. The OT suits were genius in the simplicity in the way they connected the suit and what they wore under and how it all come together. We have yet to see if the same can be said about the new troopers. I am thinking how we do it right now is a great start, plain black undersuit, elastic and stretchy, form fitting. Then you attach the ribbed sections onto this undersuit via sewed in velcro. Once it is attached once, you won't need to do it again, and will help keep you cooler and prevent it from falling out. A suit with these ribber portions built in would be awesome, but I fear expensive due to the work involved. I will leave that to Gio though!

My thoughts is that the helmet lends itself better to a resin casting and the armor to vacuforming. Since the helmet is so far as I can tell a single piece construction, vacuforming would take a lot of work to make it look right and might be unnecessarily hard.

At the moment, this stuff looks like Troopermasters 2mm AC ABS armor, ultra white and shiney. From the pieces we've seen so far, I'm pretty certain we will see armor in short order As to the helmet, my partner and I are already doing the modeling of the helmet for production. However, since we have only essentially seen one view of the real helmet, there are a lot of details still to be determined. This teaser was good because it will help us determine scale for the model.

Yes, I agree, you can see a thin strip connecting the shoulders to the torso.