Originally published at: Fantastic 3D printed 'mk49 Rescue Armour' | Boing Boing
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I do marvel at these awesome cosplay builds where you know that the actual movie they came from just used digital effects.
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They did a great job hiding the wiring and power source for all those lights and articulating panels, very slick overall look to the costume.
Now, just have to add in the flight capabilities… 
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Man, that is so awesome.
I really need to finish my Stormtrooper build…
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Yeah, that always strikes me, too. Traditionally the goal in replicating movie costumes was to try to get close to the quality of the movie, but these people do something even more impressive than what was done by the movie FX people who felt that actually making more than a couple pieces of the costume was too expensive/time consuming for the movie production.
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O ye four hundred thousand gods and goddesses, that is fabulous.
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They initially did build practical Iron Man suits, but they were heavy, bulky and hard to move around in. I know if I were Robert Downey, Jr. I definitely would have used my super-star influence to push for wearing a CGI tracking rig instead of a 90 pound suit when pulling 8+ hours days in a long, complex shoot.
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I don’t think even the initial suits were ever intended to be seen as-is on screen, though. There may have been some tests, but they had decided on CGI for the movies, it seems like. Most of the suit designs couldn’t even exist in wearable form in the real world (wrong proportions, thicknesses, etc.). They made some suits for reference for the CGI, and wearable bits for close-ups, though not much of either for later films.
But yeah, I guess it was more about getting a specific look and practicality rather than time and cost. Which makes the replicas all the more impressive.
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The Mark I suit wasn’t just a full costume, it actually had working flamethrowers. I know I’ve seen set photos from the first movie of the Mark III armor being worn but heck if I can find any online; Robert Downey Jr. does say initially they used full suits and that the LEDs in the helmet blinded him.
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I read that the full costume was too large to actually move in, so shots of the full suit in action ended up being CGI. Seems like for the first movie, they built suits that got little to no actual use on an actor.
Certainly for the later movies, they didn’t actually bother building suits, though. In fact, they changed the proportions of the designs to more comic-bookish and thus no longer be feasible as actual armor. (E.g. the legs in the “Avengers” suit were too long, with subsequent movies increasing the size of the shoulders and decreasing the waist.)
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