Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Remodelling Grim Fandango's Manny's skeletal hands for a papercraft
Another thing that needed attention on digital Manny to be able to make him into a paper Manny were his hands.
Manny being a skeleton💀, his fingers are just bones so they need to be quite thin. As you can see in the original model, they just used two small flat rectangles in a cross-shape to give them the appearance of being 3D fingers while keeping the polycount down for such tiny parts of the model.
Although you could really do the same with paper pieces, it would be pretty tricky because the parts would be so small already, and then you'd have to cut into them even more to slide the second part in, and how would you then attach the cross-shaped fingers to the hand without them easily falling off... I thought about remaking the fingers as tiny tubes, but again, the fingers will probably be so small on the paper model that it would be very difficult to do a decent job of assembling and gluing everything together.
So in the end, I decided to make the fingers really 2D; I feel its fits the simple nature of Grim Fandango's 90's 3D style and this way I can plan the paper hand to be easy enough to build and plenty strong for this papercraft.
For the same reason, I decided to close off Manny's sleeve instead of showing his radial and ulna bones. Trying to make a paper model with those pieces would only complicate things while not really adding anything that interesting to a paper model of Manny in his suit. 🦴
I hope this shows that there is no right or wrong in making a papercraft model: I rarely keep a video game model as it is, while others want to keep all the extra detail in. The great thing about making your own paper model, is that it's all about the way you like it: have fun! 🙂
How about this? Two layers for fingers, hand, radius/ulna. Gives a bit more thickness to the fingers. Then another layer on each side for the hand and radius/ulna, then two more, again, one on each side for the radius/ulna. Gives thickness and allows a hollow sleeve. You have given me a great deal of entertainment over the years, thought I would give a little back.
ReplyDeleteHi there, it's great to hear that you've enjoyed my papercraft so far! :o) It's always good to hear other people's ideas; I think some of the choices I made are because of the size that I think I want to make Manny in and because I always like to use extra thick paper (200 gsm, which is thicker than most people actually like to use!) At that size and paper thickness, the parts are tricky enough for me to be honest!
DeleteI've actually started test building Manny already (I'll post a WIP with pictures soon ;o) although I did mess up the scale somehow...
So I *will* make the final version bigger, but even then when I look at his sleeves I thought they'd be quite thin to somehow make two separate bones in there and devise a way to connect and eventually glue those skinny pieces to the inside of the sleeve on one end and the hand on the other. I guess I felt that's for papercrafters that appreciate that extra bit of detail a bit more and that are a bit more thorough and precise in glueing than I usually am... ;o)
So that's not to say that it can't be done of course, or that it will be too difficult for anyone to do or that I don't appreciate your comments! I hope you'll enjoy Manny anyway of course, but always keep thinking of ways how to do it differently!