Intro
The Sci Fi Collar is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while! A long futuristic looking collar / facemask / neck-piece.
Click on the links below to jump to the various sections of this design….
Brief & Inspiration
No brief for this one as its just something that has been in the back of my mind for a while. But I have been ispired by some artwork done by Bluefley.
http://shadowness.com/Bluefley/-first-snow-
http://bluefley.cgsociety.org/gallery/434879/
I like the idea of the large hood and the solid collar piece with the lighting on it which would be easy enough to do. I would just need to embed some LED’s into the collar. There could be a variety of functions built into the collar such as uplights for the face, red LED running lights as in the artwork above and front facing flood lights for use at night.
It would be nice to have a control panel for the lighting built either into the sleeve of a coat or onto a wrist piece. The control themselves sould also be illuminating creating a glow from the wrist unit. A variable control for dimming the front spots and a pulsing heartbeat LED should also be on the wrist unit.
Time & Money
| Estimated | So Far… | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to Design | 15 hrs | 1 hrs |
| Time to Build (Including sourcing/scrounging materials!) |
20 hrs | 0 hrs |
| Cost to Build | £100 | £0 |
Preliminary Sketches & Development
Basic ideas at this point are to have the collar in two seperate parts; Collar and Controls. The collar is going to need controls for the various lighting options and these control could either be wrist mounted or hip/holster mounted. In either case there would need to be power and control leads from the control unit to the collar.
Either configuration could feature extra lights and dials on the Control Unit. The wrist controls could feature a torch inline with the wrist. A hip/holster control unit could feature extra storage to be used as a pocket.
Review So Far!
At the moment I am leaning towards having the hip/holster Control Unit as oppose to the wrist version.
I am still torn between having a futuristic sci-fi industrial look or a steam-punk look. I can go ahead and build the electronics anyway and see how the costume evolves.
I still have to decide how best to build the collar – foam / latex / fibreglass / vacuum molded plastic…. etc!
So this whole thing is totally achievable in foam. I’ve been watching a lot more tutorials and this one for example basically covers all of the techniques…