Free papercraft 1950's Cemedine advertising car (until March 31st 2020...?)

Although I'd like for my papercraft weblog to become more the "Work In Progress" blog for my own original papercrafts that I originally created it for, you know me, I simply can not resist when a company creates a free papercraft to download from their website*...

And I have to share it now, because it might only be available until March 31st 2020 if I interpret Google Translate's results correctly...?

So why take the chance, just get this papercraft 1950's advertising car for the Cemedine adhesive manufacturing company now! (coincidentally, they recommend using the Cemedine quick-drying woodworking glue 😉)

Download + build your own free papercraft 1950's Cemedine advertising car (by Hamada Yoshiaki on Cemedine):
https://www.cemedine.co.jp/cemedine_reports/cemedinecar-papercraft.html

(download instructions: click the template previews on Cemedine's webpage for the PDF file)

* There's actually an intriguing story about how this papercraft came to be: Google Translate link

free papercraft Thanadol Class super ferry

In case you didn't know already from the previous posts, Thanadol really likes making papercraft ships! 🚢🙂

He showed me his newest papercraft ferry to share with you again; and it's a special one, because this time you can make your own "Thanadol Class super ferry" in a scale of 1:1100 and you can name it the MV Thanadol after Thanadol himself or the MV Larry, after Larry from Ceb's Model Ferries!

Download + build your own free papercraft Thanadol Class super ferry (by Thanadol):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Lu5KrNOtLI5AB4YL5BzJzEeIk-q17jAx

Grim Fandango papercraft Manny final build

As you can see, I managed to get all of Manny's papercraft parts on just three sheets in a more or less logical (to me... 😇) fashion. Manny is not a very complex model, and with one or two exceptions he's pretty much just a collection of boxy pieces. 😊

I'm usually a bit ahead of my blogposts with my Works In Progress, and I already built most of the final paper Manny! It goes to show how much of a difference edge-coloring (and of course just some extra care in general as well) can make on a papercraft, especially one with darker colors. 🙂

Stay tuned for the finished paper Manny and the release!

Grim Fandango papercraft Manny test build

So I already started the test build (and finished it 😉) of Manny from the last post. As I explained then, this is by no means the only or even best way of turning Manny into a papercraft of course! But although this is just a quick and messy test build, and I actually somehow (again) messed up the printing scale so he actually turned out smaller than I intended (18 cm, but I will make him a bit bigger) I'm pretty happy with the way he turned out. 👍

Manny is not a very hi-poly, detailed game model of course, but you guys probably know by now that I actually really like that look. From my previous Leon papercraft for example you can see that it is definitely possible to make smoother papercrafts, but this blocky style looks really good as a papercraft!

The hands went together very well too, even though they too were smaller than intended of course; Manny's scythe balances well in his one hand (I always try not to have to glue it on) and Manny's cigarette in the other, so so far so good. 😇 Stay tuned!

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! 🙂

The thing with papercrafts from video game models... (Manny WIP)

Is it easier to make a papercraft from a video game model? Well it gives you a good head start! And you can make it look as if the paper model jumped directly from the video game onto your desk! Well... sorta.

Because you will probably have to remodel it; the main issue with video game models, is that especially around their joints and limbs, they have no issues with collisions, sliding their shoulder and elbows into their arms and torso for example... A lot of the work on the 3D model for papercraft is fixing these collisions, but that's really not as difficult as it sounds!

Since you're not making a model for a video game that needs to move in a realistic way but for a static papercraft, you can just treat it as a still statue and connect all the joints in a way that just looks nice to you and that seems simple enough to assemble in paper (and of course you can always test build that 😉). More often than not, this will mess up the texture mapping though, so that's another issue that you create then and need to fix. 😛

And speaking of textures: remember how I could only find a gray version of Manny's shoes while the textures from the original version were brown? I decided to fix that too, even though as you can see it's not that big of a change because they're quite dark (but for some reason it stuck in my head that it was really important 😝).

  Stay tuned for more updates!

Strike a pose Manny, any pose! ...no not that one, another one!

With all that work capturing Manny in a nice pose from the game, to be honest I found him a bit stiff (some pun intended 😝) and I kinda really wanted him to have his scythe...

So I decided to create my own pose; and really, I did that just by rotating his arms and body and things a bit and moving them to get them in the right position, nothing fancy with rigging the skeleton (some pun... you know 😉) or anything.

I think he just looks a bit more interesting this way. Manny's 3D game model doesn't look too complicated really so I think he will make a really nice papercraft! As always, there are a few quirks, like his shoulders and elbows need to be remodelled so the paper parts will actually be connected together, but nothing I haven't done before on pretty much every video game character papercraft I made so far, so stay tuned to see me do it again... 😛