Berserk - Guts - ALA 2014

I got talked into making Guts' Berserker armor by my friend Champ. I told him it would be easy cheesy lemon squeezy because it was the same plate done 50 times. I was a bit wrong. I cranked it out in 3 weeks, but they were pretty painful weeks to be perfectly honest. Enough of me and my hubris getting me into trouble. Let's get on with the build.

Guts' armor changes minute to minute, moment to moment it seems during the manga so I decided on these references to work from. I leaned more towards the figure with small clear ups with the manga. 

Big thanks to Mikhail Klakotskiy for this pic. It really helped with patterning and proportioning the sword. 

First was to pattern it all out. I started with the shoulder.

From these I cut the shoulder and glued the ends with super glue.

From there you can heat them to get a nice curved shape.

I made a 2nd set and glued it to the 1st. Guts' entire chest is just a repeating shape starting from the shoulder.



I had to write a MatLab script to do some lifting for me on the shoulder. Essentially I resolved the shoulder into a set of vectors, then derived the angle using the dot product.

TLDR. I used math.





Had to bondo the seems.





Little trick is to put masking tape on the INSIDE of the armor to stop Bondo from getting in. So now the inside is fairly clean. I think the masking tape is still there since I was too lazy to remove it...



Made the bicep armor similarly to the shoulder. Gluing pieces end to end then heating for the curve.





Chest was done the same as the shoulder. That first shoulder pattern was the pattern for the whole chest. Guts' whole upper body is just a repeating plate. I can't stress how easy that made my life.





Added a plate in the middle to close it up and made the stomach the same method. Glue PVC end to end then heat. Noticing a pattern? Guts is nothing but repetition...



Started making the jaw for the collar. PVC foam.



Filled it in with Apoxie Sculpt.



Attached to the chest with a 1/4" thick piece of PVC foam. I wound up bringing the jaw section a bit more forward on its stand. I don't document it but I did do it.



Crotch armor was made the same. Glue PVC end to end then heat. Getting tired of me saying that yet?



Sanded down the edges.



Test fit! See if all the proportions are good.



Starting on the leg armor with a pattern. More repeating plates.





Cut them all out. Glued end to end, heated then glued together.



Cut a very small dart to the top of the leg pattern to give a subtle compound curve and ride the curvature of my voluptuous thighs.



Made that weird stripe he has on the thigh by doing the same gluing end to end method then twisting it a little bit. It was a weird shape but I really liked it.









Knees I couldn't figure out so I just brute forced my way through it by using Apoxie Sculpt. There are better ways to do this. Not really recommended.





Second test fit! Starting to look like something!



I didn't bother documenting the shoes or shins because it's more of the same repeating plates nonsense.

The mechanical arm was made using PVC and it fully encloses my arm. Had to make it quickly so not much documentation. Sorry! Googly eyes for detailing and I used a pattern from Amethyst Angel's Edward Alric tutorial for the fingers. I'll include the pattern below.







Probably the most useful part of this build. The Dragonslayer. That big beat stick of a sword. I actually printed out a pattern to get the correct taper.



Cut out the pattern then glued the wood shaft to the PVC foam.



Put up the walls perpendicular to the face.



Closed it up with another plate and started gluing the spines that would support the actual blade.



Applied the blade edge piece from PVC foam.



Closed it up with another PVC foam plate.



The whole point of the hollow design was that I could 1 hand the sword. Algerot Blacksmith made and gave me a Guts sword when I visited Mexico and it was SOOOO light.



Applied Bondo to the seams and sanded it down. Added the ONLY detail to the sword using more PVC foam. The chain link is from Sun's shotgun nunchucks.



Sculpted the pommel with bondo and more PVC foam.





Primed then painted silver.



Painted the inner part the same matte black the armor would be painted.



Btw I painted the armor. The bicep section of the mechanical arm is PVC foam with elastic joints. Mostly so it wouldn't restrict my movement.



Thanks for reading! It was a pretty tough costume to crank out in a few weeks, but it was a ton of fun!