Couldnt resist giving this thread a silly title.
I've been planning Rav Bralor for a few years now and started proper work in the last week.
First off I'm going to outline my research on the costume and then post my own progress.
Ref 1
Ref 2
Ref 3
Ref 4
Ref 5
Due to the lack of a CRL I am working to my own based around the rav bralor toy and filling in any gaps with logic based around the designs used in the toy.
Please bear in mind these are my own perceptions/assumptions and in some cases preferences and if you've made rav differently this isn't trying to say you did it wrong.
So for undersuit we already know everything we need to as it's pretty straight forward.
Flight suit: Light Grey fitted but not tight, double sleeved with ribbing around the opening of the shorter sleeve. small cargo pocket on one arm.
For the vest I believe it to be a fem fitted Boba style flack vest, If you look under the shoulder bell in Ref 3/4 you can see what looks like a Boba style cap sleeve with quilting similar to what we see on his flack vest. Due to what I percieve as the quilting on the shoulder of the vest I assume its intended to be a cotton canvas style material as opposed to a leather material like Jango's vest. Neck seal can be integrated or seperate and looks to have a vertical stitching on the toy but its very hard to tell.
Flack Vest: Light grey fitted flack vest (I intend to do a princess seam) made from cotton/canvas like material with Boba style quilted shoulders. Grey neck seal.
For the Gloves it looks like the back of the hand has quilted patches again like Boba fett has in Ref 2 with four padded strips on top, shaped slightly towards the top of the thumb. They would also most likely be cotton gloves like Boba however i think cotton or leather base gloves with a quilted cotton/canvas patch on the back would work very well
Gloves: Light grey cotton or leather gloves with Boba style quilted patches on the back of the hand.
Boots look like simple grey rounded toe chelsea boots.
Boots: Med to light grey chelsea boots (I say med to light as getting light grey chelsea boots can actually be kinda hard, med grey is more common and wouldnt look out of place) more rounded toe is ideal.
I don't have any revelations about the cloak or leather goods so thats all I have to say on soft parts.
As for the armour
The sculpt for Rav here is
very skinny and
very busty. I on the other hand am neither of these things so I've ellected to take a bit of creative liscence with plate design, tweaking it slightly to suit my wider body while still looking good and being identifiable as Rav Bralor's plates.
The final design I've came to is the centre left 2/3rds view. To counter the skinny plates looking out of place or overly streched on me I have modified the ab plate slightly, taking it from a straight triangle to a faceted, more gradual shape like Boba and Jango while still keeping the overall shape and feel of the design.
The chest plates are basically the same. I noticed that a lot of Rav builders round the plate at the side however after looking at Ref 1 I have determined that the plate actually comes to a point under the arm, not disimilar to Boba or Jango, so I added this to my design.
The final change was that of a more gradual compoind curve to the plates instead of the very cupped chest plates from the toy. Not only am I not busty enough to justify the design, faking it would look off in my opinion and on a more personal note I am seriously not fond of cupped boob plates, they just feel unrealistic and overly sexualised so for my own comfort I've elected to go for a less... gratuitous, shape
. I also feel this fits the character better as Karen Travis described female mandalorians from almost indistinguishable from male until they take off their helmets and the cupped boob plates would cancel out that feeling IMO. Nothing against others going for them they're just not my cup of tea.
There does not appear to be a connection point sculpted between the collar and back plate so I have made them join together flush, I have also added a small bit of detailing that I got from some fan art where the plates fit together with a squairish key but ultimatley none of this will really be visible in full costume. There will be a small rivet at the top which is the chicago screw that holds chest and back together.
The final bit of design research that I have come to is that the cod should have a raised plate, similar to Boba and Jango but higher up and less protruding, Looking at the cod there is an indented line that forms a shape similar (but more unique) to the Boba/Jango plate, I have deduced that this denotes a raised plate instead of a recessed detail as the backplate which also follows a more traditional Boba/Jango style with a raised semi-circle portion also uses this same sculpting method of an indented line around the raised detail instead of trying to sculpt a sharp angle. Ref 2, 3, & 5.
Now that all of that faff is out the way onto the good stuff.
As I'm typing this, I have constructed my vest, neck seal, a balaclava, and gloves, I have also started work on hard armour in the form of the backplate and collar.
I have a set of scrubs to use for the flight suit that I already have some work done on and I have multiple faux wool blankets in a lovely navy blue colour to make the cape from, (I know itll be hot but I want something nice and hevy for realism)
I am planning on constructing almost everything from scratch however I will be buying a few things in
Aprilstorm props 3d Printed drop bear helmet, Aprilstorm props 3d printed rav Bralor gauntlets and the boots. I may also outsourse the leather work depending on how brave im feeling in my ability.
First up: Soft parts:
The vest is made from some hevy polycotton. The back has a pannel made from a strechy jersy fabric, this will be covered up by the back plate and belts when done so the difference in fabric wont be noticable. The added bonus of this method is that the vest is completely without fasteners, the strech allows me to pull it on over my head, holds the fit nice and tight and also allows me to have a bit more range of movement.
The neck seal is made from the same material as the vest with some wadding on the inside, since taking this photo i have added fabric to the bottom to hide the gap between the neck seal and the vest.
The balaclava is made from the same jersy material I used on the vest with an elastic headband. in the future I hope to add a leather headband similar to what Jango has in AOTC and attach the mic from my voice amp to that.
Gloves are inexpensive leather ones i got a few years back, the patches were made on a sewing machine from the same material again then hand stitched to the gloves. They're not perfect but I am very happy with them.
Now for the hard parts.
Here is the backplate and collar I made which is mostly finished right now but still had a while to go when these pictures were taken
This was made with a very complicated darting method that I came up with. I will be posting a tutorial soon to instruct others on how to do it. You can also see the squared key I mentioned in the design phase between the back and collar.
the last thing I have to show are just little details that I've been working on
I got a bunch of rough cut aluminium RF stalks, which i sanded and ground to a nice uniform finish
I combined these with a beautiful RF topper kit that I got from Simpn Phipps, the topper was sanded through the grits and squared up perfectly before carving the hole for the stalk and drilling out spots for some LEDs. the outside was painted matte black and the inside was lined with aluminium tape to bounce light around, some non-wired LEDs were installed and then the lense was glued in, which had also gone through sandpaper grits from 120 to 3000 then douced with gloss clear coat to make it look like glass. Light can enter through the lense and make the LEDs look lit up dispite them not being so but this is only certain angles.
I hope you all enjoy. I'm hoping to be more active on the forum from here on out and will try to return with regular updates on Rav.
