Research

Now that I have a pretty good idea of what I actually want to do and what the outcome will be I have to begin research to make sure I can actually do it. As covered in my previous post there are a number of research areas to look into before I can really start work.

At the most basic level these are: armour research to help in my concept design, sculpting research to make sure I know how to actually make this thing, and a lot of smaller peripheral topics like my dynamic effects.

First up, the design. Concept research is a multi pronged attack. I want my armour design to be realistic, obviously nothing like this currently exists and therefore I will be imagining a fair chunk of my design, however I want to make sure it is based in reality. This means I need to look for all of the real reference that I can and use the ideas contained within when designing my armour suit. I will be looking at what really exists today as these inventions are the ground work that an armour design like mine will eventually grow from.

With the present covered I will also be turning to the past for some tips. It has been many centuries since mankind has used plate armour but there were more centuries before that where they did. They faced a similar challenge that I am, protection vs manoeuvrability, and they came up with lots of answers. I will be taking a leaf out of their book to see how they made plates slide over one another to give the wearer the most flexibility possible.

And finally I shall be looking to the future, kind of. Nothing like my eventual armour design exists but similar designs have been created in a non-functional way. Costume armour like created for the movie Iron Man doesn't have all of the features that the movie would have you believe, but it was created as a full scale wearable suit that someone had to move in. Seeing how this more modern design achieved similar results to that of medieval armour could give me an insight into how to go about my design.

However, making the suit realistic enough is only one stage of the design phase, it also needs to look awesome. As such I am gathering as much reference material from across the web as I can. When I have gathered as many pictures of sci-fi armour that I think looks great I can try and distill what it is exactly that makes it aesthetically appealing and then put that into my armour. I already have lots of images so I will be looking through them and showing off the best ones here in a coming post.

I will also be covering the other area of research in a following post. Continue to watch this space for more major project news.