Software Build

The approach is to build this in computer first. Incorporate all the design elements. Give and take details away without wasting time (and material) in the real world. I used Maya. With help from a friend, armed with some great tips, I was able to build the head from scratch. Took me a few days to tweak it to final stages.

*TIP: Do not overbuild! Remember, the more polygons there is at this stage, the more cuts and folds you will have to deal with later.

My intentions with this Maya model afterwards was to be exported into Pepakura. (Pepakura is a software program for unfolding a 3d object into printable parts) Very easy to learn. It's a free downloadable program you can get from tamasoft.co.jp

I also had to learn how to model in Maya. (I hate modelling. No good at it) But, for this project, I'd go through the basics just to get my head done. Like I said before, this is a learning experience. I treat ALL my projects like this. If I don't know how to do it, just learn it. Resources are abundant. Especially these days with the internet. Never fear the roadblocks. Challenge them!

When building this model in Maya, I had to incorporate one key feature. The face must retract up into the helmet! I don't want to always be limited to the small eye holes in the mask. I can get more peripheral vision AND more air to breath when the face mask is in the up position. Well, that's the idea anyways.  So, I made a 'bracket' that is attached to the face with a point to pivot. I'll explain this with a pic later.

Once the Maya model is done. I broke it up into smaller pieces: "mohawk", "horns", "face", "sideburns", "helmet", and "goatee". This made it a bit more manageable in Pepakura. I can then focus and treat each piece as smaller projects. I exported each piece as an OBJ format so Pepakura can read.

Here is the entire head imported into Pepakura. Just for fun. Looking at the unfolded pages on the right.. you can see why I decided to break it down into smaller pieces.

Here is the face piece. And the "L" shape brackets are what I was referring to as the rig I made to allow the face to pivot and rotate up into the helmet. That might still sound confusing. Hopefully it'll be clearer when this gets made. hehe

You can see on the right side of the screen shows the face unfolded. Each of those rectangles represents a standard 8.5"x11" sheet of paper. This face will take 7 sheets of paper to make.

I had experience with Pepakura before as I had made 3 heads before (One was my halloween costume 2 years ago)

For the scaling in Pepakura. I used my mockup (from my previous post) and gave a rough guesstimate as to how big the head should be. I guessed 20" across (including the horns). With that number, I set in Pepakura (508mm = 20") Simply repeated the same process with all the other imported pieces.

*TIP: When unfolding in Pepakura. The default unfold just plain sucks. I find it super inefficient. I always redo all the fold/unfold/cuts/lines manually. Not only to fit them onto the pages better. (To save paper) But, more importantly to make sure there aren't any impossibly hard cut or fold lines. Trying to avoid those long thin folds. (Keep that in mind when building the model in Maya too)

Here's the "helmet" piece.

*TIP: Upon the import of the OBJs into Pepakura, one of the dialog boxes would ask you if you want to "flip". I'd choose flip. That way all the lines and numbers are printed on the INSIDE of the model. Leaving the outside nice and clean of visual clutter. I know it's not a big deal for this particular build, because I'm going to paint over it anyways.

Notice the faces is grey on the outside as opposed to the white on the inside. This is because I flipped the model.