A lot of people like the iPad Foldify app (and others like the Toyota Scion paper toy car app Paper Shapers) where you can customize your own papercraft toy before printing it and for good reason of course!
It's fun to be able to quickly make a variety of your own, unique papercraft toys, and the touchscreen of the iPad makes it easy for people to draw on their paper toy free-hand with their fingers, which most people find much easier than using a computer mouse. ;o)
But there are other, older but still neat free papercraft toy generators that you can use on any computer if you don't have an iPad of course!
One that's very easy to use is Carnaval Action Cruisers, where you can pick lots of different skin colours, hair styles, facial features, clothes etc. to create your own, personal Carnaval Action Cruiser papercraft toy to print and build!
And then there is Paper Critters, whose aim it is to create a whole colony of customized paper toy critters! It lets you customize just about anything on your papercraft toy, and you can draw on your papercraft toy free-hand, use simple clipart shape stamps or even upload your own personal image!
On Gloo Man, you will find a very simple tool to mix and match a variety of features to create a unique papercraft Gloo Boy or Gloo Girl toy!
And on PaperMe, you can upload a picture of yourself (or of Patrick Stewart ;o) to make a *really* personal papercraft toy, which you can then customize even further with different hairstyles and clothes!
The BuddyPoke was an app on social networksites like Facebook to customize your own, personal 3D avatar of yourself, and if you earned enough "coins", you could unlock a feature to turn your unique, personal avatar into a paper toy to download, print and build too!
And it isn't just people of course: on De Zuinigste Rijder, you can customize your own car! (and find out how fuel efficient such a car would be... ;o)
And even a website like Madurodam had a tool that would let you create, print and build your own, personalized Dutch canal house!
So you see, lots of papercraft toy customizing tools for you to play around with, even if you don't have an iPad. Look around online and you'll likely find more!
(and of course you can also simply make your very own simple paper toy yourself entirely from scratch, or start with a blank template from paper toy creators like Cubeecraft, Portland Paper City, e440, Boxpunx, or one of the many others nowadays of course! ;o)
Have fun customizing! ;o)
I've been getting a ton of experience modeling for the Dota 2 workshop. Gonna put some of that to use making some papercrafts in the future :D
ReplyDeleteAlthough it isn't absolutely necessary, having experience with making digital 3D models yourself is never a bad thing of course! ;o)
DeleteEspecially if you want to keep going down the 3D path, using unfolding tools like Pepakura Designer: if you plan ahead and take care preparing the digital 3D model to be made into a physical paper model, unfolding it will be the easiest step! ;o)
Have fun playing around with the DotA workshop, and I'm sure everybody would love to see what you come up with in the end! ;o)