Accurate stormtrooper helmet for Vintage Stormtrooper - UPDATED 12/14

[Diddly]

Looks great Dressel. The eyes seem kind of off to me still (the left one looks a little bigger and the right one seems to still be drooping) but I'll wait and rejudge it after I see your final/painted version.

Any plans on making casts and selling them?

[Phrubruh]

Any plans on making casts and selling them?

That's a good idea. Please make casts.

[Dressel Rebel]

I love you guys.

I'm going to try casting with a white resin tomorrow so it requires minimal painting, just the black eyes and couple of gray areas.

I'll post pics when I have some.

[Nicklab]

Looks like a good cast so far.  It seems like it may be sitting a tiny bit high on the neck post.  Now is this a full head sculpt, or a helmet?

One thing you might want to be prepared for if you cast is that it may shrink.  This is something that even Hasbro can't avoid with production at the mass scale.  So give it a decent ammount of time to cool.  Otherwise you might run into potential deformities.

[Jesse James]

shrinkage (huh huh huh) with resins is generally negligible...  There's actually special ones that shrink more, if you want, but general purpose ones don't shrink much at all.

[Dressel Rebel]

shrinkage (huh huh huh) with resins is generally negligible...  There's actually special ones that shrink more, if you want, but general purpose ones don't shrink much at all.

Yeah good looking out Nick and Jesse.  I got the shrinkage issue under control.

I tried copying the head sculpt with some impression materials that are the equivalent of silly putty at the office today just to see if I could get out of buying a ton of stuff to start copying the head.  It was just okay.  So I slapped a quick coat of paint on this junky first copy, then decided I still wanted to rework the mouth a little bit, so ignore the hunk of uncured resin in the middle of the helmet and this is just a quick 5 minute paint job and a rough copy with a bad impression material.  Just ignore all the unpolished crap on it, that's just a very rough cheapo test casting:



So you can see the general size and shape of the stormie helmet next to Hasbro's which is on the left.  Don't worry the quality of the final casts is going to be pristine, this is just to give you a rough size/shape with some color.

So what I did after that was I went out and got a quality mold material and that will be curing for the next day or so around the original sculpture that I showed you yesterday.  Then I got some white casting material, so the helmets won't even need to be painted except for the small black and gray areas.

I don't think I'm supposed to use the new quality mold for a couple days, when I do make the first real helmet, I'll post it here.

[Dressel Rebel]

Looks like a good cast so far.  It seems like it may be sitting a tiny bit high on the neck post.  Now is this a full head sculpt, or a helmet?

It's a full head sculpt.  You can vary how high or low you want it to sit on the neck post.  Also it can be dremmeled out to be a removable helmet.

[Dressel Rebel]

So today I completely finished the stormtrooper helmet 100%.  It is tight.

2 days ago I made a mold of a Marvel Universe A.I.M. terrorist head for a test run, before I dropped my 2 weeks worth of work on the stormie helmet sculpt into an unknown material.  The results are awesome.  I was able to make a perfect replica with Alumilite silicone rubber mold and casting resin:



So, taking that into account, I went ahead and immersed my stormie helmet sculpt into the rubber concoction.  Demolding will be on Saturday morning and then I can start casting helmets.  The mold is capable of popping out a helmet every 5 minutes.  I'm going to use bright white for most of them so the thing is basically painted already.  Here's my stormie sculpt next to one of Hasbro's:





I guess I can make some molds of my Marvel custom sculpts too eventually, Ghost, Swordsman, Sandman, Chen Lu, Penance just to name a few.

I need to order some white resin, all I have right now is tan, and I'm not painting 100 helmets for my collection (except the black/grey areas).  I'd rather they pop out of the mold every five minutes 90% painted.

[Nicklab]

Looks like a good cast so far.  It seems like it may be sitting a tiny bit high on the neck post.  Now is this a full head sculpt, or a helmet?

It's a full head sculpt.  You can vary how high or low you want it to sit on the neck post.  Also it can be dremmeled out to be a removable helmet.

Okay.  You're probably going to have better results with the full head.  The removable helmets (that Hasbro has done) are so much more prone to deformation, and it's simply because the tolerances are so tight at that scale.

If you want some good movie reference pics, check out this page.  You can see some really good screen caps of Stormtroopers close up.

[Dressel Rebel]

If you want some good movie reference pics, check out this page.  You can see some really good screen caps of Stormtroopers close up.

Thanks, if I end up needing to refine my sculpt when I start churning out cast copies, I'll be using that.

I would have never had to do this project in the first place if Hasbro had used that when they rolled out this beauty:



But now that the sculpting is finished, I'm really glad they gave me the reason.

[CHEWIE]

Dressel, that helmet we were discussing is en route to you.

[Dressel Rebel]

Dressel, that helmet we were discussing is en route to you.

You're the man CHEWIE.  Albert Pujols was a fool for doing that to you.

[Dressel Rebel]

Well a few days ago I got a stormtrooper helmet in the mail from CHEWIE, which is the mini-bust Gentle Giant variety, a perfect fit for our 3.75" Hasbro figures.  I immediately made a mold and made a bunch of casts from Alumilite white plastic.  I cleaned them up and painted 2 of them.

Any white spots you see in the black paint on the left eyes of antennae are light reflections.



Here are 2 painted and 2 unpainted casts:



Hasbro's on the left, mine on the right:



And for sandie Hasbro's on the right, mine on the left:



Victory!!  At long last, stormtroopers that actually look how they are supposed to!  Look how smashed and out of proportion Hasbro's helmets look next to proper sculpts.  Holy cow.

Sooooo guess I have about 100 more to paint.  I have hated every stormie helmet since 1995, a real albatross to this hobby IMO.  The iconic stormtrooper, always a dud.

But now, fixed!!

Thanks again to CHEWIE for his help.  I owe you one.

[Phrubruh]

The final product came out fantastic! Congratulations on an amazing helmet.

[JesseVader08]

Wow, you did a hell of a job with this project.  Congrats on not only tackling this, but doing it so well!