MASS EFFECT 2 - NORMANDY SR2

It has been a long time coming but I can finally cross it off my build list - the Normandy from Mass Effect! This is built from scratch mostly from styrene and then cast in resin.

Making Normandy

To start I drew many many plans from reference - plans were drawn directly from the 3D model of the Normandy straight from Mass Effect 2. I planned out the frame of the body and set to work on my scroll saw cutting these sections from thin plywood.

I then used the trusty foam I found in a skip years ago to fill in the sections and loosely shaped them.

A quick note here - this project stopped and started a bit during the early days. Two frames ended up being built because the moisture in the air caused the first frame to warp over a few weeks which meant it wasn't straight. The next frame I made sure to complete the process of packing with foam and skimming with body filler quicker to stop this being a problem.

The entire frame was then filled with body filler and then sanded, sanded and sanded some more. The sanding process alone took me days to get a uniform surface.

Onto the wings. These were going to be built from sheets of Styrene. Some elements of the wings are repeatable and so only one of the set needed to be made for one wing and then copies were cast for the other wing.

Ta - da, not much to it at this point.

Wire was threaded through each section in preparation for the LED's. Each thruster would have 2 LED's - a white one and a blue one - to give a more two tone look. Wide angle LED's were used (square, flat top) to stop the spot light effect that regular LED's have and light the entire area of the thruster.

It jumps a bit here - 0.5mm Styrene strips were added to the frame of the body for panel lines. It took a while to get this symmetrical!

With the main body done a brush on silicone mold was made. From this I could cast a hollow copy in Easy-Flo 120 polyurethane resin and cut the holes for the windows. I didn't add the windows to the master because I was still going to have to cut them in the cast version and didn't want to do essentially the same job twice.

Metal bars were added during the casting process to keep the body rigid and stop it warping over time.

To make the windows square I drilled a regular hole and then pushed in some square Styrene rods. The edges were then filled and sanded with Milliput. This worked quite well.

And the finished article - ready for paint!

The colours of the Normandy (particularly the Cerberus version) are straight forward - an off white, black and an orange. There are repeating patterns which made getting them symmetrical important! There is no magic formula for this, just long and tedious masking.

The trickiest part was the Normandy lettering. I had intended to get a decal made - however printing things in white with a transparent backing is a specialist processes and for the life of me I could not find a decal printer who could print white. I could get stickers printed in white - however these are quite thick and I didn't want to have a visible edge around the lettering.

I looked into vinyl lettering however the scale of the letters was much to small for vinyl cutting machines to work with - at least for the people I contacted.

Which left me with only one option - do it by hand.

Above I printed the Normandy lettering to copy from and stuck this to the back of a clear plastic sheet. I then laid a strip of low-tack masking tape down and set to work on carefully cutting the letters.

After the letters were done I carefully removed the strip from the plastic sheet and transferred it to the body. The counters of the 'A, R and D' were added afterwards.

The whole thing was sprayed white.... wish me luck!

And the final result - not too shabby. It's not perfect but a quick weather with some steel wool to wear it in and it works reasonably well.

We're ready for the close ups - only now the darn thing is too big for my standard cheap-ass backdrop. This is supposed to be a professional outfit.

Final Photos

The 'shoot' took place over a few days because it was hard. Long exposure times were used to light the figure with different colours. This generally involved waving different colour LED's around in the dark until the desired effect was achieved.

For the more action oriented shots we wanted to simulate explosions. For this we used cotton wool, glued together, frayed and lightly sprayed with greys and black at the edges. LED's were then attached to a coin cell with a crocodile clip and stuffed into the cotton wool balls. The results are actually quite good. All of the effects you see barring some light contrast changes in post are done in camera.

And just for fun - here's a shot of how the shoot was put together - this is when we were still trying to get the lighting right and things were over exposed. (You can see us moving the light source in this shot) We couldn't turn the LED's for the explosions off once they were on - which proved troublesome for long exposures!