This is something that I've been quietly working on over the last few weeks, and now that I'm at a point where I've been able to do some of the initial casting (which means I can GLUE stuff and get a good idea of the proportions) I figured I'd go ahead and post about it.
I had an idea a couple of months back to do a custom-sculpted set of power armor, that I could cast up for personal use in my various Marine-based armies. I was rather daunted, though, by the idea of having to sculpt up multiple sets of legs in order to not have a bunch of guys standing around with the same leg pose. I hit upon the possibility, while reading about custom-built Transformers of all things, of instead creating a single sculpt, in multiple parts, that could easily be assembled in any number of poses by making the legs into separate pieces from the pelvis, and creating an additional joint at the knee. Cutting at these points to do a repost is pretty much the most common
SM conversion known to man, so why not break it down so I only have to do the work once?
I've used parts from a couple of Space Marines as the base for the sculpt, though at this point they are basically just an armature and covered by green stuff and plasticard. I used small plastic beads to form the "male" ends of each joint, to provide a standard size rather than having to sculpt the round end. The legs are completed, and I made their mold and cast a couple of test sets so that I could finish the torso and arms (it was nigh impossible to get a sense of the proportions while sticking everything together with Blu-
Tac). The torso/arms are next in line, and once that's done I'll work on a stock backpack as well as a shoulder pad template. Due to the sizes, the shoulders will not fit standard pads, but I don't yet know if they'll fit Terminator-sized pads. We'll see when I get there!
I'm not planning to create any custom heads for the project, as there are plenty of alternate heads being made out there by other people/companies.
Also, the leg pieces were trimmed of flash but not filed down, and I just put them together in a sort of "Reference Pose" rather than anything dynamic so that 1: I could make sure they'd fit on a standard 25mm base (not looking good) and 2: use them to properly match proportions for the Torso.