Papercraft Final Fantasy 8 Sorceress Edea WIP 3: remodelling & texture edits

The original Final Fantasy VIII game models are a great looking combination of 3D meshes and textures, made to look good on the screen. To make them into papercrafts however, the 'tricks' used for the game don't always work so I did a lot of work to change things that would work as a papercraft.

For exmple, to keep things 'simpler' for the PlayStation's hardware to handle, small cutouts like on the feathered ends of Edea's collar are just a transparancy of the texture on just a few triangular polygons.

On a printed papercraft model however, the transparancy would show up as white paper of course. You could then just cut out the 'transparant parts, but the textures are quite small, so I decided to edit the 3D model from the start here to get a cleaner reference for later.

The same goes for the iconic 'wheel' on Edea's back; it's an intricate design, and the small texture doesn't  really do it justice. A lot of the holes would become blurred together in the papercraft, and you wouldn't really know where to cut. I remade the shapes, so you actually will be able to see. 😉

For Edea's accessories like her hairpins and earrings however, it's a bit of a mix: some of the hairpins have the same issue of just being small, blurry 2D textures (I remade those as cleaner shapes to look much sharper) while other pieces are made as 3D shapes that would become much too small to build out of paper (I remade those as 2D pieces).

It was a lot of work, but I think in the end the paper model will look better with the changes. Stay tuned!