Orange Star wants YOU!

Here's the Advance Wars unit I was working on alongside of the Tomb Raider EDS, have fun building!

• download Orange Star Missiles

Humpty dumpty papercroft?

As promised, here's an update on the EDS test build.

It's not a very difficult model, so it's going pretty quickly, although fitting the inside of the suit inside the helmet properly might require some patience.

And as always, there a couple of things that I want to fix before releasing it. Note that I built the visor out of regular cardstock here, but that's just because it's just the test build.

And maybe on the final model when the visor will be transparant, it might actually be easier to fit the inside of the suit inside the helmet, when you can actually see what you're doing... ;o)

Stay tuned!

Tomb Raider diorama by Elso

I made some good progress test building the Extreme Depth Suit, but I'll show you tomorrow, because today I want to show you something else!

I got something really cool in my inbox yesterday, a little diorama made by Elso combining some of my Tomb Raider models and some of Sascha's.

You may know Elso from some of his other projects (like a life sized Terminator endoskeleton... ;o) but I never knew he was a Tomb Raider fan!

I have to say it looks really great, and he even explained how he did it in a thread at the Spanish speaking Modelos de Papel forum (although you have to be a member to view the thread...)

Maybe the pictures (there are a lot more in the MDP forum thread...!) will inspire you to do something similar? ;o)

Have fun building!

The next step: test building

I'm just going straight from the 3D to the test build, to see if everything works out the way I planned. So far so good... ;o)

Take a look inside

As you can see, the plan is to make the visor of the Extreme Depth Suit transparant, so you can see Lara's head inside.

Although there are special printable transparancies, those are quite expensive, and since there won't be any special textures on the visor, I think it will be better to just use a normal transparant sheet.

I'm anxious to try it out, because I think it will look pretty nice! But for those that can't be bothered with the transparant parts (it will make assembling the torso a bit more difficult...!) I'll also include an opaque visor. ;o)

Stay tuned!

Lara from the waist up

Well, except her head yet... ;o)

But if it keeps going like this, I'll have that done soon enough as well. Redesigning the joints to make them suited to make in paper form is really the most time consuming part on this particular model.

I'll have to think of something to easily tell how to glue the hips together, because it's important to glue on the angled parts correctly so the balance will be good and Lara won't tip over... ;o)

Stay tuned!

Lara Croft below the belt

Unlike on a Twilight Princess model like ZaL, the changes made to simplify a model from an "old" game like Tomb Raider Chronicles, are often a lot more subtle (but no less important).