Additive manufacturing is among the most vital technological advances of the twenty first century. It’s revolutionized the best way we construct all the pieces from airplanes and wind generators to medical implants and nano-machinery — to not point out the tidal wave of creativity unleashed as soon as the tech made its means into the maker neighborhood. In Cosplay: A History, veteran cosplayer and 501st Legion member, Andrew Liptak explores the theatrical origins of the craft and its evolution from costuming enthusiasm to full-fledged fandom. Liptak additionally appears at how advances in know-how have impacted the cosplay neighborhood — whether or not that is the web boards and social media platforms they use to attach, the telephones and cameras they use to publicize their works, and, within the excerpt beneath, the 3D printers used to create costume parts.

Excerpted from Cosplay: A History – The Builders, Fans, and Makers Who Bring Your Favorite Stories to Life by Andrew Liptak, revealed by Simon & Schuster. © 2022 by Andrew Liptak.

In the summer time of 2017, I picked up a Nintendo Switch and started taking part in the newest installment of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda collection, Breath of the Wild. My son, Bram, and I hacked and slashed our means by way of Hyrule. Featuring a large open world, the sport is filled with fascinating costumes, objects, and weapons, and, with out query, we settled on a Halloween costume for that 12 months: one of many predominant character Link’s colourful outfits, to be accompanied by a handful of cool-looking objects: a sword, protect, bow with quiver of arrows, and a magical pill known as a Sheikah Slate (a magical information pad).

My native library had simply put in a 3D printer, and after a little bit of poking round on-line, I discovered the recordsdata for the Sheikah Slate, then despatched them a file to print. A day or so later, I had the white pill in hand. After a bit sanding, some paint, and a ribbon, I had a serviceable duplicate. When I got here throughout one other set of plans for a lightsaber-like Guardian Sword++ (1), I had a good friend with a 3D printer of his personal print me one. Before I knew it, I had two of my objects for the character.

The strategy of 3D printing additionally goes by “additive manufacturing,” “computer automated manufacturing,” “layered manufacturing,” or “rapid prototyping.”(2) The course of begins with a designer-developed 3D object often known as a Computer Aided Design (CAD), which the software program converts to a file that may be learn by a printer (often a Standard Tessellation Language file, or STL). This STL file guides the pc to put down plastic in a collection of fantastic layers. As the machine lays down every successive layer, one can slowly construct up a three-dimensional object like an element for a fancy dress. While sluggish, the method permits makers to print extraordinarily detailed objects that you just may not be capable to create with conventional manufacturing strategies.

There are three predominant 3D printing strategies makers can use. The most typical is fused filament fabrication (FFF), through which a spool of thermoplastic (like ABS or PLA) is melted in a heated nozzle and extruded onto a construct floor to type the article. The subsequent methodology is stereolithography (SLA), through which a printer beams a laser right into a vat of resin, bonding the fabric right into a stable object, layer by layer, because it slowly works its means from backside to prime (or prime to backside). The third methodology is known as selective laser sintering (SLS), through which a machine places down a layer of powdered materials like fantastic resin or metallic. When the layer is in place, the machine makes use of a laser to hint the specified sample, fusing the layer into the fitting form. Once one layer is full, the machine lays down one other layer of powdered materials, and the method repeats itself.

Each of those strategies can be utilized in quite a lot of methods. Chemist David E. H. Jones had initially proposed the method in his New Scientist journal column in 1974, observing that “many liquid monomers can be polymerised to solid by ultraviolet light, or even visible light. Accordingly, a laser-beam shone through a tank of monomer should leave an optically straight fibre in its path,” he wrote. “A laser beam aimed in the right direction zig-zags all around the tank to create an interlaced web of fibres. By proper settings of the mirrors anything from a Brillo-pad to a vest can be made: and with no moving parts at all (3)!”

From right here, engineers and scientists started to plan methods to appreciate his idea. In 1981, Japanese scientist Hideo Kodama wrote a paper for the Review of Scientific Instruments—“Automatic method for fabricating a three-dimensional plastic model with photo-hardening polymer”—through which he described the tactic for printing up an object (4), which a number of firms and entrepreneurs adopted a few years later earlier than registering a collection of patents for particular methods. Thus, 3D printing was born.

The automated course of initially discovered a house as a producing approach. It allowed firms to assemble new kinds of fashions, but additionally grew to become a simple approach to create a prototype of an object: one merely wanted to develop a pc mannequin and print it up, with out having to fabricate a brand new set of molds or a machine half. But the method didn’t instantly grow to be widespread, thanks partly to the patents that people and firms held on these strategies. That started to alter within the mid-2010s as these patents expired, inflicting a increase within the availability of 3D printers. As Filemon Schöffer wrote in TechCrunch, “When the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printing process patent expired in 2009, prices for FDM printers dropped from over $10,000 to less than $1,000, and a new crop of consumer-friendly 3D printer manufacturers, like MakerBot and Ultimaker, paved the way for accessible 3D printing (5).”

Prop-making studios in Hollywood have used the know-how for years to create costumes, however the newfound availability of residence units has been a boon for cosplayers, permitting them to create particular person props or complete costumes (6).

Before the widespread availability of 3D printers, sculptors needed to depend on quite a lot of strategies to duplicate costume components: carving out EVA foam, making resin molds, machining metallic components, sculpting bucks for vacuum formers, and different strategies—a number of effort in the event you’re trying to construct just one merchandise or a restricted run of things. Now, a cosplayer can print up a whole preset go well with of armor with a 3D printer.

Ahead of Dragon Con 2019, Jack Durnin of Charleston, South Carolina, determined to construct a Martian marine from Syfy’s science-fiction collection The Expanse. “I saw the promo for season two,” he instructed me on the conference, “and I saw the Martian marines in the teaser, and was like, ‘What is this show?’ ”and ended up binging your complete collection.

Durnin was already an skilled hand when it got here to costuming. In highschool and school, he made brief movies, for which he constructed lots of the units, costumes, and props himself. As he acquired into cosplay, he constructed Commander Shepard’s N7 armor from Mass Effect. When he watched The Expanse, he realized that he might put collectively his personal set of the Martian marine energy armor.

While a few of the present’s followers had tracked down the real-world helmets and parts that the studio’s makers had used to create the onscreen costumes, the Martian marine costume was completely different. It was fully authentic to the collection, and if he wished his personal model, he’d should make it himself, from the bottom up. “I started with the helmet,” he defined, “because I knew that would be the hardest and would take the most time. I started with screenshots and then the initial shape, trading the three dimensions of the helmet, and then started sculpting it.” From there, he went to work on sculpting the forearms and armor, utilizing the identical EVA foam that he had used for his Mass Effect armor. Durnin and his then-girlfriend (now spouse), Jenni Tyler, debuted their costumes at that 12 months’s conference. Their work was rewarded by astonished onlookers and even garnered reward from the solid and crew of the present.

Access to a printer has one other impact on the costuming neighborhood: it democratizes the sphere in a very unprecedented means. In earlier days, a talented modeler might produce an in depth mannequin to promote to or share with the neighborhood at massive. But this methodology inherently got here with a bottleneck: stated maker might produce their merchandise solely one after the other. By making a file and sharing it with others, ten or extra makers might put collectively the piece on the identical time. Hundreds of an identical costumes might materialize worldwide nearly concurrently.

In the lead-up to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, cosplayers began numerous teams to create costumes for one of many movie’s new trooper lessons: the shoretrooper. While some makers determined to go the normal route of sculpting and vacuum forming their very own variations, one maker determined to mannequin up his personal printable model.

In 2016, Sean Fields launched an internet site that includes a Dropbox hyperlink that contained the entire recordsdata required to place collectively the costume. Best of all, he launched the recordsdata for free of charge for anybody to obtain on their very own. As a consequence, tons of the world over constructed their costumes from his design. Fans from the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere constructed the costume, turning out at occasions clad in it. Others adopted: a maker named Paul Prentice developed his personal set of extremely correct shoretrooper armor, which he gave to makers in trade for a charitable donation.

This know-how had one other, surprising facet impact: it helped to shorten the period of time it could take somebody to develop and construct a fancy dress. “When I was first becoming a prop maker,” Brian Anderson defined to me at FAN EXPO Boston in 2019, “there was an enormous investment in being able to produce something.”

When Lucasfilm launched the tv collection The Clone Wars in 2008, Anderson, a longtime member of the 501st Legion, wished to construct a set of clone trooper armor from the collection. “It took me over a year to sculpt and produce the molds for that suit, and an investment of several thousand dollars and materials just to get to that very first set.” Making armor in that vogue, he defined, wasn’t one thing one might do on impulse: it required a number of planning and funding to finish. But as soon as that cash was spent, “subsequent suits were easy to make, because I could then vacuum form the armor [onto the existing molds].”

But with these molds already shaped, he couldn’t simply enhance them, particularly as new particulars got here to gentle. “Now, with 3D printing, the risk is so much lower.” At the time we spoke in August 2019, the ultimate Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, had but to hit theaters, however he had already printed up a helmet that would seem within the movie. “They were just shown in publicity photos for the first time a couple of weeks ago,” he stated, but when there was a big change, the unique developer might merely take the mannequin, tweak it, and rerelease it on-line for builders to print out once more. “That happened to me with the helmet from The Mandalorian; I’ve already made that helmet from the file that Sean Fields produced. He said from the beginning, ‘This file probably isn’t accurate, and as I find new details, I’m going to iterate on the model, and anyone who buys the file now will get every free iteration through completion.’ When I first started working on that, a bunch of people asked why I was wasting my time on it if I knew it wasn’t going to be accurate. It’s twelve dollars’ worth of filament to print one. If I have to print a new one, it’s no big deal. And so, it lets people jump on trends very early and not have to worry so much about getting it right on the first try.”

But whereas 3D printing has proved to be helpful to cosplayers, it’s not the be-all and end-all approach that can substitute the strategies that preceded it. Processes like conventional sculpting, molding, and others stay in use all through the world, and printing an object doesn’t imply that one can merely pull it off a printing mattress and step right into a conference with it in hand. These objects typically require postproduction work, often sanding down the traces left by the printer to a clean floor (itself a labor-intensive course of), filling in cracks and seams made when becoming a member of two components collectively, and priming and portray the article.

Even as soon as full, a prop may not be very sturdy. A maker would possibly choose to print out a hole model of their desired prop, with a honeycomb-like inside construction, to save lots of printing time and weight. A few years in the past, I purchased a reproduction run from Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 movie Elysium. The components had been fantastically designed and printed and had been extraordinarily gentle. I constructed the prop, however when it fell (twice!), it broke alongside a few weak factors, requiring fixes. When a good friend printed up Link’s Guardian Sword for me, I had him do it as a stable half, realizing that it could be a lot sturdier.

Given that 3D printing typically depends on melting plastic to extrude, props can be extraordinarily vulnerable to warmth: a couple of cosplayer has famous that they’ve had a prop or costume half that’s melted on them in excessive warmth, like in a scorching automotive within the solar or if left subsequent to a heater. This isn’t to say that different manufacturing strategies are inherently higher: objects solid in resin can soften, deform, or shatter; fiberglass and plastic can crack with age or pressure; and materials can tear.

But regardless of these drawbacks, 3D printing is a game-changing know-how, permitting cosplayers to work up complete outfits and costume parts rapidly and cheaply, opening the sphere to new costumers who may not have been ready to participate beforehand.

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(1) “Un Bal Costumé Chez Jules Verne” [A Costume Ball at the Home of Jules Verne], Le Monde illustré, twenty first 12 months, no. 1044, April 14, 1877, https://laporteouverte.me/2016/11/13/un-bal-costume-chez-jules-verne.

(2) Herbert R. Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 204.

(3) Lydia Smith, “5–10 March 1891: Bovril and the First Ever Sci-Fi Convention, at the Royal Albert Hall,” Royal Albert Hall (web site), March 2, 2016, https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/information/2016/march/5-10-march-1891-bovril-and-the-first-ever-sci-fi-convention-at-the-royal-albert-hall.

(4) “ ‘The Coming Race’ and ‘Vril-Ya’ Bazaar and Fete, in Joint Aid of the West End Hospital, and the School of Massage and Electricity,’ ”Royal Albert Hall (web site), https://reminiscences.royalalberthall.com/content material/coming-race-and-vril-ya-bazaar-and-fete-joint-aid-west-end-hospital-and-school-massage-and-1.

(5) Alex Palmer, “The Strange Story of the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, the ‘World’s First Sci-Fi Convention,’ ”Mental Floss, May 31, 2021, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646499/first-sci-fi-convention-vril-ya-bazaar.

(6) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, A D Condo (entry), up to date May 24, 2017, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/condo_a_d.