Double jointed...?

Some of the things that you often need to fix when making a papercraft model of a videogame character, are the joints, like in the case of the Postman, the shoulders and the elbows.

In videogames, polygons often simply pass through eachother when the arm bends, but when those polygons will be made out of paper, they can't do that anymore of course.

This usually means you have to remodel these parts a bit, to create a more natural looking elbow and shoulder (well, for as far that's possible on a N64 era videogame character of course ;o)

Stay tuned for more updates!

Sashy sandals

If you're gonna be running runs around town all day delivering mail, you need good shoes of course.

So what the Postman is doing with these sandals, is quite a mystery... ;o)

But he's got them, and I wanted to get rid of the small polygons around the ankles, to prevent unnecessary small parts on the paper model.

Stay tuned for more updates on my papercrafting process!

Postman's hopscotch

Before I unfold a model in Pepakura Designer, I always try to imagine how you would build it afterwards out of paper.

That way, you can already spot a lot of things that simply won't work in paper, but a lot of things are also simply personal preference (there is no set guide of rules for making a paper model the way you want to of course! ;o)

Because Pepakura Designer can only unfold what you feed it, if you want to change anything, you should do so in the 3D model first.

This was one obvious fix on the Postman, for example: although in a virtual game world, it's okay to have his legs dangle underneath his pants like this, in a paper model, they can't be floating in air (on young Link, I actually had to give him boxershorts to have something to attach his legs to... ;o)

There are many more things that need a look at of course, so stay tuned!

Where else is he gonna deliver the mail?

The Postman is famous for being the fastest man in Clocktown, always on schedule delivering the mail, so I felt his running pose would look very nice for his paper model.

But as you can probably imagine, a paper model balancing on one foot like that, is sure to tumble over... A stand is the obvious solution, and what better one for a Postman than a mailbox? ;o) I hope you like it!

Stay tuned!

Still a bit freaky, I guess

After fixing the textures, the Postman looks much better already (his "underwear-look" was actually caused by the messed up clothing texture ;o)

So now I can start looking more closely to the model, to see which parts need fixing before you can make it out of paper, and which parts could simply be done a little easier.

Stay tuned!

Going postal

Like all Terminans are kinda alter egos of their Hylian counterparts from Ocarina of Time, the Postman from Majora's Mask is really just the Running Man (the guy that would always beat you in a race by 1 second grrr...) with a Postman's Hat.

He doesn't really look like himself in the picture yet, because the 3D software doesn't quite use the same rendering methods as the Nintendo 64... ;o)

So the textures are usually the first thing to fix when making a paper model from a game, and even then you usually keep on fixing them some more as you go along... ;o)

Stay tuned!

Black Hole Recon Release

Recon units are the least powerful vehicles in the Advance Wars series.

Their main purpose is to clear up the "Fog of War" in some of the missions, and if necessary they can also take on Infantry (attacking Mech units is unadvisable, though...)

And of course, you can use them to attack unarmed units like APCs. As long as there are no other enemy units nearby, that is...

• download Black Hole papercraft Recon unit

Have fun building!

World domination

As you can see, the final build is done, and immediately the Recon's Black Hole DNA takes over as it tries for instant world domination (it took a while before it understood it was made out of mere paper and that wasn't an actual world...)

The instructions will have to wait a bit until I have some more time, but it shouldn't be long now until I can release it.

Stay tuned!

The grey Black Hole Recon unit

After tracing the pencil lines with a black pen, I colour the parts for my Advance Wars series with markers and then I scan the parts so I can copy into the templates in Photoshop to add the part numbers and such.

And of course this way, I also only have to draw mirrored parts once, because I can simply copy and mirror them on the computer. ;o)

Stay tuned!