The thing about making papercrafts from extracted video game characters...

The thing about making papercrafts from actual in-game 3D character models from a video game (..or in this case from a PlayStation 2 Memory Card save file 😉) is that they almost never make a good papercraft models... And I don't just mean that characters from modern games are so detailed that they are better off being "simplified" a bit first before being turned into a papercraft model with Pepakura Designer...

A Twilight Princess Puppet Zelda head based on the in-game model, but a bit simplified for papercraft

The in-game models from the classic Tomb Raider games are already pretty low-poly though, so they don't really need simplifying. They do need some attention as well of course, mainly because of "collisions". Collisions are when for example on the in-game model the shoulder moves into the body when the arm is moved, or when the lower leg moves into the upper leg at the knee when Lara is running.

With the technology for the time, this looked okay on the computer screen when playing the game, but with papercraft this is physically impossible of course. The solution is nothing special though, it's just a matter of removing the problem parts and connecting the pieces back together so that it looks okay (and you really don't have to be a professional 3D animator or anything to do this! 😉)

Polygons can go through polygons, but paper can't go through paper.

And then there are Save icon Lara's hands and ponytail. Like I said when I started this papercraft, I chose this save icon version particularly because this low-poly version fits in so nicely with the other classic papercraft Tomb Raider vignettes I made.

However, the hands on the classic Lara's are literally just rectangular blocks, while the ones on Save icon Lara are just a bit more triangulated. The ponytail on the other hand is a bit more detailed on the classic Lara versopm. Oh, and Save icon Lara doesn't have any weapons (but as we know, Angel of Darkness Lara could do some hand-to-hand combat too when needed... 😉)

Save icon Angel of Darkness Lara has some small peculiarities compared to the "real" classic Lara.

I decided to leave Save icon Lara as she is though, because this papercraft vignette will be very minimalistic and these small differences make her special I think. Stay tuned!