Marvel Fan’s Fully Functioning Iron Man Suit Just Won Halloween

Halloween is almost here and some people are already dusting off their costumes for the big day. One fan took things to another level with a realistic suit of Iron Man armor at a convention. The post on Reddit shows off the frankly staggering detail that went into this cosplay. Panels on the back have LEDs and motors to open and close the flaps. The gloves on the armor have backlit circles for the repulsor rays. In the best element on the whole costume, the helmet opens and closes seamlessly, and the eyes light up once the transformation is complete. People in the threat are understandably impressed by the entire armor. It is truly an accomplishment to be proud of due to the painstaking detail apparent in the construction of the suit.

Now, the only thing that is kind of curious is the fact that this model of the armor is from a couple of movies ago. The look most fans are used to seeing now is the wildly improved armor from Avengers: Endgame. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) used a mixture of book smarts and technical wherewithal to forge something new. His first nano-tech based armor bit the dust during the Battle of Titan in Avengers: Infinity War and it was time to upgrade.

Weta Digital is the team behind Stark’s new layered nano-tech approach in Endgame. The giant battle in the third act showed off exactly what the new armor is capable of. Comicbook.com was able to speak with Weta’s visual effects supervisor Matt Aitken earlier this year. He talked all about the design process that led to the debut of this impressive piece of tech.

“Here in Infinity War, and then subsequently in Endgame, he’s got the Bleeding Edge nano-tech that he’s developed,” Aitken begins. ” And that’s about this idea that the suit is actually made up of these nanoparticles that can kind of form a fluid and move around on the surface of the suit, and reform different weapons, and then kind of solidify and crystallize into a rigid, metal suit. We developed that tech for Infinity War, and then really extended it for Endgame for two particular sequences.”

As he recounted how the nano-tech armor is crafted to emulate a human body, skeleton, flesh, and all, Aitken then leaped to the massive third-act faceoff between Stark and Thanos (Josh Brolin). There was a lot of heavy lifting that came with that fight.

“There’s the fight with Thanos towards the start of the third act, where he’s generating a device we called the Lightning Refocuser,” Aitken continued. “Something that is able to capture Thor’s lightning energy and then convert it into like a super blast of Iron Man repulsor energy, which he uses to attack Thanos. So that was nanotech and we got to contribute to the design of that particular manifestation of the suit’s tech.”

But, everything wasn’t roses, there were some significant changes that come with the end of the film. The “I am Iron Man” moment proved to be even larger than it seemed as a viewer.

“The suit’s trying to protect Tony from this energy and it’s sort of trying to repulse the energy back, but the energy’s too strong, and so the suit’s getting damaged,” recalls Aitken. “We worked up quite a complex simulation where we see the energy surging through the suit, and then the suit’s repulsing it back, and these big kind of gouges being gouged out of the suit. We showed a version of that to the studio, and they said it was doing all the right things, but it was just there was too much going on.”