Aurithron - Building a 3d printed cosplay helmet

Everything started in December 2023, when I discovered on Thingiverse, what I indentified as a cosplay, made by M16 studios, without even knowing what protogens were, I downloaded all the files, and few months later, I already had printed, assembled and even painted everything

Picture of my Mk3 Protogen 3d printed helmet below, model by M16 studios

And once the easisest part was done, there was one part left, the visor part, meaning some vacuumforming job, to change the shape of a flat petg sheet by heating it, and this pretty expensive process happens to be pretty hard, and it made me fail two times, So I ended up with a helmet I liked, given up since I was unable to properly finish that project that kept me busy for few months

After few months of thinking about that fail, I came with a new idea, more or less like “ And what if I made my own helmet, meeting the design traits I like, being stronger than my failed helmet, and being less restricted than protogens when it's about personalisation ”

And that's how, starting from this idea, I started modelling tje future aurithron helmet, with a flat visor, meaning easier to make since it won't need any kind of complex method for changing it's shape

Picture below, the first iteration in Blender, only the global shape

And after struggling for few weeks using some unadapted software called 3d builder (a that's software even more restricted than tinkercad) I finally had a final version, ready to print with, as you can see on the picture below, the visor shape defined by a 3d printed structure, that would hold petg sheets.

And now comes the part with issues, since big projects never realize without issues, and it started when I split the helmet in many smaller parts in order to print each one using two Prusa Mini, in addition to this I quickly realized how HEAVY this helmet was becoming, but I didn't mind that since I was halfway close to the final result

And came the time I tried the almost finished helmet, and this is when I found out that this helmet's weight wasn't the only issue, in addition to it's weight, my head realized after few seconds how uncomfortable this helmet was, and few days later I realized how hard ( and expensive !!! ) it can be to dye the sheets I need in order to build the visor, without even thinking about the electronics.

 And what about this project's future ? 

At the moment i'm writing, I still have the helmet, damaged but still, I relead few months ago a video on my youtube channel showcasing the design part, it's not worth the thing to post it here since  it didn't age very well mostly because of it's bad quality

nevertheless, despite working on this helmet, I'm still having fun sketching, thinking and trying various things arround this project, such as an articulated tail that could, someday complete an evolution of that helmet, you can find my video about it below :

And that's pretty much everything, I condensed 2 years of thinking, modelling, working printing and assembling to only keep the main step of that project, this is also the first time I'm writing an article, my writing might not be the best, i'm volontary writing in English instead of French, hoping to make this article more accessible, Thanks for your reading !