Tom DePetrillo considers himself an additive artist, building his works piece by piece to create large costumes. Earlier this month he took his Hulkbuster Iron Man costume to New York Comic Con and won $1500 during their Eastern Champions of Cosplay competition.
DePetrillo has a maker's heart, and when he sees a character in fiction his brain starts to develop a plan to build a costume that mimics the character's look. The Hulkbuster suit is the largest project he's ever completed and took more than two years from start to finish.
The suit is 6 foot 6 inches wide, 44 inches thick, and 9 feet 6 inches tall. It weighs around 95 pounds. The suit was completely built to the specifications of DePetrillo's body, to the point that one of his assistants could only wear the suit for a few minutes before the unbalanced weight caused him discomfort.
Construction took 1600 hours between the design and build phases. DePetrillo works mostly in EVA foam, polycarbonate, aluminum, and LEDs. Lights come from the arc reactor in the chest, beams from his eyes, and LED strips that can be triggered in the dark.
James Bruton from XRobots also built a Hulkbuster costume this year. His construction was meticulously detailed in a series of forty three videos, each running around ten minutes. The XRobots suit has much more mechanical functionality built into it, with servos and stepper motors tasked with creating motion in exterior components.
It's amazing to see these massive works of art created using the engineering principles we use in product design and development. Design concept sketches are drawn, parametric modeling takes place before construction, prototyping happens using a variety of materials, budgets and parts lists are tracked, and materials are evaluated to select the correct properties for the application.