Moe's Projects - Predator Costume

My late 2019 project I decided to take on was a Predator Costume like the one from the 1987 movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Well not a 1/6th scale costume but rather a full sized one.

I can't make the costume perfect movie accurate because 1) I am no where near the height of the original actor who played the predator and 2) picture perfect is time and cost consuming. This costume was put together for under 500 I believe.

This build will be my version of a similar styled P1 Predator with as many bells and whistles as I can put together.

Like all things, we start with the planning. I went to the https://www.predatorium.com and into their resources to get a bunch of Pepakura files to start converting for my project. Then I went to Thingiverse to see what they had and grabbed Predator Shoulder Cannon by makerslabcz.

After I had all the files, it was time to get to work and make everything printable. It took about a month in spare time to fix everything up and resize it all to my body.

The backpack:

This model was good for pepakura but not for a 3d print. I first ended up fixing the files and printing it out. This will be the shell to house most of electronics and power bank.

I only used half of this model from thingiverse and fitted it with a spot for a flashlight and a servo and an outlet for the wires to go out the lower back.

Both halves are held together with 8/32 screws and nuts.

Using this tutorial, I grabbed an Arduino Mega, an MPU6050, battery pack and wired everything up with 2 Cat 5 connections (One that goes to the helmet Where the mpu6050 will sit, and one to the left gauntlet for controls and sound)

This is a shot from underneath where the power switch is as well as the recharge port.

Left Gauntlet - Creation, sound and control.

Continuing with the planning, let's start with the pepakura file and add a hinge in the print so that it can flip up if I need it to. I also made a slot for my Phone below the flip plate.

Let's allow holes for momentary switches and latching switches, cat5 connection and audio out on the flip plate:

Now let's get it printed and loaded up:

I wired it up with an adafruit soundfx board and started wiring everything together. The sound out went to a 3.5mm headphone jack which will plug into an external speaker.

It's actually much cleaner inside now.

Final outside picture of the left gauntlet.

Right Gauntlet:

Making retractable claws is not the easiest so I decided to go with gravity as the extension and retraction method.

Design:

Start with the pepakura file and make it printable.

I made some changes to the original pepakura file and incorporated a latch system to allow the redesigned blades to be locked in an extended or retracted mode. You can see the green piece acts as a pivot point in the gauntlet and the blue stick prevents the claws from sliding too far forward.

The plastic claws looked nice printed, but I wanted something a little stronger. I went with aluminum because it is easy to shape and dull so that it is not sharp.

And the final fit and test with a pull from a string.

The Head:

5v lasers set up to go on when the servos turn on.

Inside of the helmet wired up with the MPU6050 and 3 freaking laser beams.

The back of the head was made to house a hard hat but eventually I adjusted it to house only the portion of the hard hat that goes around your head.

Beads for the hair.

Body:

I didn't want to do a latex suit because I know how hot and uncomforatable those can be. Basically, this whole build began with the undersuit. If the undersuit was bad, nothing else was getting done. I got a preprinted suit with most of the details and I have to say, it looks great and breathes nicely. I sewed a zipper into the front for bathroom breaks.

Hands:

I still needed hands so I bought a pair of latex warewolf gloves, Painted them up with acrylic paint and glued the fingers to a pair of brown leather gloves.

Feet

Basically the same thing done with the hands. Ordered a pair of warewolf feet covers painted and glued them to an old pair of sneakers. I used brown gaffers tape on all seems to act as a leather wrap around the feet. Sorry I don't have pitcures at this time.

Shins:

Nothing different here. Made pepakura files printable and adjusted the knee caps to combine with the shins so that there is less things to attach when getting dressed.

Thighs:

Same as the Shins:

The fishnet look:

I took an actual fishing net and cut it up and made a shirt and pants. The fishnet pants along with thigh and cod armor get secured to the undersuit using a belt.