The Making Of RoboCop's 3-D Printed Suit
Sony Pictures and MGM's RoboCop remake, starres Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton.RoboCop remake has divided fans of the original from the get-go. Particularly contentious has been the reimagining of the RoboCop suit, which turns the original into sleek, stealthy, almost ninja-like armor.
The new Robocop reboots the story from Paul Verhoeven's 1987 sci-fi action movie of the same name about a hard-working police officer targeted and nearly killed by a drug lord whose decimated body is used in an experiment to create the perfect cybernetic police officer.
For the remake, director José Padilha turned to Martin Whist, production designer of the film for a new design. It turns out a lot of attention is paid to the functionality of the suit, including how the organic elements are maintained and how it's controlled.
It's this iconic suit, but many of its elements would appear dated to the eyes of a contemporary audience coming to the franchise for the first time," Whist says in an interview with Co.Design.
The team made two updated suits based on the original one. The first RoboCop suit was a prototype that looked much like the costume from the original which gets upgraded over time. The upgraded suit is black that comes complete with a gleaming red visor. According to Whist, the sleeky design was inspired partly by real-world materials like graphene.
Once the designs were finalized, the 3D models of the two suits were sent to company Legacy Effects to build. The company is famous for making suits for Iron Man, Avatar, Real Steel, and Pacific Rim, among others. There elements were then printed out on high-definition 3D printers (Legacy owns Objet and Envisiontec 3D printers) before being painted and assembled into the final suit.
Check out the video where, Jason Lopes of Legacy Effects explains how 3D printing is used to design and create the characters and creatures used in some of the most popular blockbuster films and animations of recent years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEVYUsng9Pc
Source:http://www.fastcodesign.com/3026175/inside-the-making-of-robocops-3-d-printed-suit
