N7 Eagle

Let’s get the fanboy gushing out of the way first: I’m a HUGE fan of the Mass Effect series (yes, including Andromeda). Gameplay, story, characters, concepts, visuals – everything about it really resonates with me on many levels. It’s one of my two favourite game series of all time, the other being the Legend of Zelda, and an eventual goal of mine is still a full N7 cosplay. My original idea was to start with an EVA foam M8 Avenger (complete with lights and sounds), but having never worked with foam before it was feeling a little too ambitious as a first project so things sort of stalled for a bit and I continued doing 3D printed props. Then the Legendary Edition came out and of course I started playing again, which really rekindled the urge to make something from the game. I decided to try a straightforward solid foam N7 Eagle – much smaller and way less complicated. For this one I feel like I need to give a lot of credit and thanks to Bill Doran and everyone else at Punished Props for making awesome and incredibly useful books and videos, along with the template I used to get started on this – available free on their website, by the way. I’ve been a fan for a while and long intended to try something using foam, so here we go!

Up front caveat – this didn’t turn out 100% perfect, but I definitely learned a lot about working with foam and I’m still very pleased with the result for a first attempt. The most difficult adjustment for me was going from the fidelity that printed parts gives you to the small inconsistencies involved in a foam prop build. Foam builds may not always have perfectly clean lines or exact dimensions, but I kept reminding myself that the intention with foam is most often cosplay and if it looks good from a distance / in photos then success!

The first step in getting started was to cut out the basic shape of the gun, this shape will get additional foam layers and other bits to eventually build out the full prop. I opted to split the pattern into three major sections and join them back together later, hoping it would be both easier to cut out and sand this way. This worked fairly well, but in retrospect I probably could have gone with just two pieces or even not split it up at all. I don’t have a bandsaw (or a work area appropriate for indoor power tools), so I cut all the foam for this project by hand with a decent knife that I continually sharpened. If you have a bandsaw definitely use it for this; you’ll have a much easier time getting clean straight cuts and save a bunch of sanding and cleanup. For these base sections, I sandwiched together two pieces of 10mm EVA foam using contact cement, then traced the pattern onto that and cut.

You’ll probably notice in the images above that I didn’t use the knife for some of the trickier curved parts. Those could totally be done with a bandsaw or scroll saw, but it would have been difficult for me to get a clean cut there with a knife so I left that for shaping with the rotary tool – with all the curves there I was planning to do some sculpting in those areas anyway, so it worked out fairly well in the end. Once everything was cut out and cleaned up, I changed my mind about needing two separate pieces for the top/front and glued those back together with contact cement

With the basic shape of the gun finished, it was time to start adding the various detail layers that will turn it into what it’s supposed to be. I used various reference images to determine which pieces of the pattern needed to be cut out (and how thick they should be), then did a bunch of tracing and foam cutting using 2mm, 4mm and 6mm foam. I cut the pieces for each side individually, flipping the pattern for the other side; this is another area where a saw might give you cleaner and more consistent pieces, especially if you can sandwich the foam and cut both sides at the same time. Using the knife turned out ok, but it did create some minor differences between the sides – no big deal though!

With the layer pieces all cut out, cleaned up and beveled with some sanding drums on the rotary tool, I used a combination of contact cement and CA glue to attach them in the right places on the body sections. Time to move on to some foam sculpting! The trigger guard and hand grip areas needed the most shaping since they have a lot of inset curvy bits, and there was also a bunch of rounding and blending everywhere to smooth curves and hide seams. This is where I made one of the bigger mistakes of this build: I did most of this with a rough grit sanding drum since it was quicker, assuming the rough finish it left could be easily smoothed out with finer grits later. This might have worked fine if I had enough extra material left to remove, but I rough sanded too close to the final shape so smoothing it out to where it needed to be would have changed the size of the gun way too much! This meant I was left with a not ideal finish in the end, but it was a good lesson learned: Don’t go below 220 grit for sanding foam, unless it won’t be visible and you just want to hog out a bunch of material!

Once the sanding was all done I scored a few detail lines with a knife and sealed the foam as best as I could with a heat gun; this also opened up the detail lines nicely. Then I used a little latex caulking to hide some seams, added a few wooden pegs for registration, and glued both sections together – again using contact cement and CA glue. I then drilled a couple of holes in the front for the barrel and the smaller barrel (?) thing underneath it. The barrel is just a small piece of 1/2″ PVC pipe that I beveled on the sander, and the smaller one is actually the cap of a dry erase marker that ended up being just the size I wanted. With that, all the construction parts were basically done! I sealed everything with a couple coats of Plasti-Dip, which helped hide my rough foam finish areas a little but not nearly as much as I was hoping.

Time for painting! Full disclosure: I started by painting the whole thing a metallic aluminum, intending to ultimately leave some of the sections this colour and painting over it as needed. The aluminum ended up not really being the look I was going for though, so I then painted everything by hand using black and some gray-ish shades I mixed. In hindsight, it would have probably made more sense to just paint the whole thing black and then hand-paint the other colours afterwards. I cut a couple of quick paper stencils for the logo and grip triangle and added some additional red and white detail. The reddish piece in the middle is illuminated in the game, but since I wasn’t adding lights to this build I tried to replicate a lit look using some paint blending – it worked somewhat and was definitely good enough for what I was trying to accomplish here.

I weathered most of the exposed edges with some bright silver, and used some more gray to add chipping to the logo and colour stripes. A few coats of matte clear and it was all finished! All things considered, I’m very pleased with the result – it looks pretty good in photos, and the rough finished areas are somewhat hidden by the black colour as long as you don’t look too closely.

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