by Its that time of year yall! Fire up your printer and make something scary! This year instead of decorations and random knickknacks we are going full tilt again. Maybe not as serious as a Mech Suit but pretty damn close! This time, I’m paying tribute to one of the best games I’ve had the opportunity to play. In an endless dessert of shitty expensive AAA and half baked never completed early access games, there is one game that stands above all. I am of course talking about no other than Helldivers 2.
So, how do we pay homage to this great game?! By giving it the respect it deserves!! Some well recognized cultural appropriation of what its like to be a HellDiver from Super Earth! The recipe for a Helldiver requires the following: Armor, Valor and a cool ass cape. Lets dive right in!
Protect your Freedom with Ceramic, Kevlar and lots of PLA
You already know what I’m going to say 🙂 Off we go to Thingiverse.com to find some armor plating. Off the bat the coolest thing I found was actually not helldivers related, but in fact ODST Shoulder pads. The designer of this magnificent armor did a really good job making it easy to glue together and attach to a hoodie via safety pins.
26 Hours later and a bit of super glue, we have 2 well functioning shoulder pads with all the Halo ODST swag. In all seriousness, I was genuinely surprised by how easy and well the armor fit and stayed comfortable. But we need to protect more than just our shoulders! Our forearms need some love too!
Brace Yourself Helldiver!
The bracers I found are a universal fit, unless you have Popeye arms… With a very simple design, the bracers print time dropped down to only 18 hours for both of them. However, they didn’t work right out of the box.
They are designed to have straps that wrap behind the forearm. Being that I was already on a safety pin kick, I fired up blender and modified the STL. I added a small pillar in the strap slot so the safety pin can attach.
With arms like these, no bot nor beast will be able to withstand my juggernaut charge towards glorious freedom!
Sweet Liberty My Leg!
Next, we need to protect our knees. Nothing like landing the hell pod and starting the fight with a bad knee.
Feeling inspired with how well the shoulders came out, I decided to modify the top part of the shoulder pad. I added in a spot where I can slide in a safety pin to keep it attached to the top and bottom of my knee. I could have done a better job getting it all attached but I was short on time and it only needs to work for a day.
Helldiver Chest Armor: Stops hemorrhaging 50% of the time all of the time
With all of the joints and limbs covered, now we need to worry about the torso. Now, I’m not that insane to try to print piece-meal an entire chest armor. I’m insane enough to own real chest armor 😉
One full plate carrier loaded up with Level IV ceramic/Kevlar tri-weave plates, super light, super protective, super earth quality. Why wear the plates? Mostly for look, an empty carrier looks weird and the extra weight is good for me 🙂 Alright, with our body protected, lets move on to patches and valor. Let the world know that we are a HELLDIVER!
How to HellDive in Style!
Being protected during a helldive is important, but looking terrifying is what really matters! When you land and your hell pod pops open, the next bug or bot should be shitting its pants. How do we pull that off? One Word. Stratagems.
Before every helldive its required to pick Stratagems to support you in the field. Luckily one designer out there on Thingiverse, made all my favorite ones 🙂 Printing these isn’t completely straight forward. In order to pull off multi color I need to do some Cura magic.
In Cura there are GCODE injectors where you can specify actions based on certain conditions. In this case, after a set layer count, pause the print job, move the head somewhere safe, keep things hot and send me an email. Once I get the “HEY CHANGE ME!” email, I swap the filament color and un-pause the job, the printer does the rest!
Another 3D printed flare I added is a HellDiver Skull. Unlike the fancy multicolor stratagems, this one was single color and came out super quick! Via Cura I was able to tweak it to make it the perfect Chest Piece.
The rest of the mobile propaganda is regular normal printed paper memorabilia. Specifically honoring those we lost at Meridian Creek o7 and those who fight for well managed Liber-Tea.
The only article left, the thing that gets caught in everything and will most likely get you killed in the field, the cape!
All Hero’s Wear Capes and by Hero, I mean HellDiver
I slightly cheated on this one. Ended up buying a generic ass cape off of amazon that came with an even more generic ass mask. The real meat and potatoes here is going to my bomb ass wife and her dope as skills with a Cricut machine.
Hey, my expertise is in extruding, can’t be a master at everything… Anyway, its as easy as finding the right HellDiver logo and blowing it up to fit the entire cape, preferably without a background. From there, she does her magic and steams the logo directly onto the cape. Instead of tying the cape around me like some bug/bot sympathizer, we safety pinned it right to the tactical vest!
The results, well lets just say its one of the many reasons I married her 🙂 Ok Ok Ok…. lets wrap this post up and get to some trick or treating!
So What the Hell Happened?!
Well… the boys decided to go as Bluey and Bingo, so I didn’t exactly mesh to well with the rest of the family. But we did end up getting a ton of loot, and I did have a few fans out there on patrol. Safe to say, while this wasn’t a MechWarrior grade costume, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy making it and had fun along the way. Even a few adults out there noticed the 3D printed armor and admired the work.
Welp, next few posts are going to mostly be technology driven, done a lot of server work with the home lab. But I will have some random 3D prints done along the way, trust me on that 🙂