Working with resin fiber resin can be hazardous and not everyone has access to a vacuum form machine. While Shawn's final costume is impressive, it's certainly not cheap.
Shawn's Full Scale Space Marine Costume Debut at Maker Faire 2012: After cutting away excess plastic, a bit more sanding, and spray painting, his costume was complete. Once Shawn was done, he went a step further and vacuum formed the fiber glass parts, creating a hard plastic shell. As a result, Shawn and anyone else going down this route will have to spend a considerable amount of time sanding, applying more resin, and sanding some more until the surface is smooth and round. The problem with a glued Pepakura model is that it's sharp and angular, which isn't good for a costumes that are supposed to be round and smooth. He then glue them together and reinforce the card stock using resin fiber resin. Shawn loaded those PDO files into Pepakura and printed out 2D cut outs on card stick. A member on the Obscurus Crusade had created PDO files based off 3D models from Relic Dawn of War game. On June 4, 2012, Shawn Thorsson posted a step by step instructions ( link) on how to build a life size Space Marine custom using Pepakura Designer, a program developed by Tama Software, which allows creating paper craft models from 3-dimensional data.
