The Suit Itself

Before I could go any further I needed to find a suitable jumpsuit or coverall to convert; this proved to be harder than I thought. None of the obvious places (Home Depot, Canadian Tire, etc...) stocked jumpsuits and those that did (Army & Navy, Mike's Work Warehouse) only had them in navy blue (too dark!) or the wrong flippin' size! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

In desperation I tried the old army surplus store round the corner from my house, Gorilla Surplus.

Oh my God: why did I not come here first! Not only did they have a massive array of coveralls and flight-suits, but they were the right size and colour. On top of this, the fact that they had been used gave them that perfect post-apocalyptic look! Apparently these guys supply all the military props for Battlestar Galactica and Stargate. Looks like I lucked out!

Here is the suit...

...Vault Dwellers with a high Perception score may notice the bobblehead top-right. :)

I also picked up a broken airsoft Walther P99, which I'll use as my sidearm if I get time to paint it. I may well return to Gorilla later to pick up gloves, holsters, padding and maybe some aviator goggles if I am feeling crazy rich.

The only downside is that flight-suits are a bit more expensive than coveralls (apparently epaulettes are in high demand, dontchaknow)...

Flight-suit: $80

Walther P99: $15

Total Spent: $105

Planning & Materials

Having studied other peoples' costumes and the in-game models I did a bit of research on costume making techniques to decide how best to create the belt. There are two sites that have some quite impressive work on them: Volpin Props and Evil FX. They both have load of info about how to make a suit of Mass Effect armour from foam floor tiles...

...and Volpin has made a freakin' awesome AER9 Laser Rifle from Fallout.

Inspired by these two sites, I figured that floor tiles would be good to make the belt and metal suit pieces from, so I set about sourcing some while turning the texture file I mentioned earlier into a blueprint that I could cut the foam from.

Trying to find flat foam floor tiles in Vancouver is nigh-on impossible. After a week of searching I decided to go with these...

...and sand the texture off. Fortunately they are grey on the underside (which I'll use for the front). Not perfect, but it should be OK once the paint is all on (fingers crossed). And they were only fifteen bucks from Cambodian Tire.

Total spent: $15

Reference

Before I began I need to gather a ton of reference to make sure I get the right look.

The Fallout Wikia has a great page all about vaultsuits.

For the purpose of authenticity I fired up the G.E.C.K. to take a look at the in-game models.

There are about five different flavours of jumpsuit (vanilla, armoured, tech, security, etc...); I figured if I made the standard version I would be able to mod it later.

Using the Fallout 3 Archive Utility I ripped the texture from the main archive...

Using this image I was able to construct a fairly accurate blueprint of the belt and other detailing...

Research

Before I began, I did a little research to see what other people had created.

Here are some pics...

Hmmm, so that last one is a little too sexy-time for my liking, but it's pretty close to the vault suit from the original game, which was a little more... tight-fighting.

I want to make a suit that is authentic but takes a few liberties to make it cooler (or, to be fair, easier!) I found one suit that did a great job on the padding round the knees on the vaultsuit but I can't find it again... drat!

One effort that blew me away is from SaccadianRythm. He did a great job on the belt and even made a paper PipBoy. Incidentally, I have one from the Survivor's Edition of Fallout 3, so I won't be making one of those! Maybe I'll mod it though because the clock stopped working loooong ago.

The thing that lets most of these costumes down is the front of the suit - the Fallout 3 suit has layers of panelling to add a very distinct cut and detail. I'm no seamstress, but if I wnat to up the bar, it looks like I had better get handy with a needle and thread.

Hi There

Hello, I decided to start a quick blog about my experiences creating a Vault Suit from Fallout. I'll write these posts while the paint is drying... :)

Anyway, I'm about a week into my build already, so this will be more of an instructional than a traditional blog as such. Here is a picture of what I'm trying to emulate...

My goal is to get it as authentic looking as possible before Halloween... which doesn't give me much time!!!

I'll keep you posted as to my progress...