With the magic of 3D printing, you're now one step closer to being able to fulfill that dream of growling, "I'm Batman," and not looking like a fool in a costume.
Julian Checkley of the Order 66 Creatures and Effects studio in Ireland is known for his abilities to recreate iconic characters such as Bane and Darth Vader. This time around, Checkley outdid himself.
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The Batman suit was 3D printed by Tundra Designs and Gauntlet FX. Checkley says you can buy it for about €8,000, or roughly $8,862, depending on the specs and gadgets desired. That said, after receiving the 3D-printed model -- which was based off the suit from the 2013 video game "Batman: Arkham Origins" -- Checkley's team did extensive airbrushing and assembled the pieces to "try to take the armor to the next level."
The team attached a custom-designed undervest to the suit, which "allows the suit to go on in under five minutes ... rare for a costume of this complexity," Checkley told The Huffington Post. Going further down the rabbit-hole bat cave, Checkley's team also changed out the 3D-printed rivets for real ones, and extensively weathered the costume to make it look like Batman wasn't a crime-fighting rookie.
Unfortunately, the suit is not exactly battle ready. "Sadly, the armor is only made from various grades of flexible urethane rubber and foam that wouldn't even stop a spoon from stabbing you," Checkley told HuffPost. "It's cleverly painted to look like hardened armor but it's actually quite light, flexible and rather cool to wear."
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Checkley did offer a solution for those who truly want to become The Dark Knight. "If you were to cast a version in titanium and laminate it with Kevlar, I'd say you have a pretty effective suit of practical armor," Checkley explained, adding: "But I have no plans to do that and certainly no intentions of going out to fight crime. I'll leave that to the pros!"
The reason Checkley picked the particular "Batman: Arkham Origins" video game design for the suit was its apparent aggressiveness, compared to the Christopher Nolan and other film adaptations. "When the 'AO' game came out, they gave us this huge, moody, beaten-to-hell Batman that even had stubble," said Checkley. "In my mind, it was exactly how a guy would look who spent his evenings getting battered to hell and not sleeping normal hours."
Checkley's final suit received praise from the video game's suit designer, Ville-Valtteri Kinnunen. "Your suit is scarily how I imagined it to be when I designed it originally," Kinnunen told Checkley after seeing it.
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The images -- mostly shot with a drone -- have recently started going viral on sites such as Reddit, Kotaku and The Mirror.
Checkley is looking to add more gadgets to the suit in the near future, which will make the it even more realistic. At the moment, he has a batarang, a grapnel gun and a four-barrel fireball shooter.
"If anyone else fancies getting out there to fight crime, there's your chance!"Checkley joked.
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