Pixies – Papercraft Icons!

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Pixies

Some time ago I had the strange but funny idea to put some emoticons into my shelf. Why not? My black furniture deserves some color and I think it’s kind of funny to have something ‘in real’ that you usually see on screen only.

So I collected some of my favorite emoticons, enlarged them to a suitable size and imported one after another into the Cinema4D viewport. I created a linear spline for each Pixie and manually placed some vertices along each emoticons outer shape. After that, I re-aligned all vertices to ensure that they are placed as exact as possible to achieve the geometric and blocky pixel look.

To keep it straightforward, I used each enlarged emotion image as the texture for each Pixie. Then I put each Pixie spline into an extrude NURBs and gave it a decent depth (“thickness”). This is not only to let the papercraft emoticons appear more “3d-style”, but also to give them a good foothold (which is quite important if you want to open your room’s windows).

Creating all the models did not take too much time. Then I used Pepakura Designer to unfold them, printed them out and glued them together. That’s pretty much it -except that I noticed white lines and marks on the finished models where I had to fold the paper (which scratched away the ink there). I used a black marker to paint over those white places, but the marker was too big to cover all the finer details. Will have to buy a smaller one and try again.

Anyway, these papercraft emoticons (I just named them Pixies) are good eye-catchers and bring some color into your shelf

My papercrafts

I use to create my papercrafts in Cinema4D, which requires a good amount of low poly modelling skill (remember, you'll have to manually assemble everything in the end). To unwrap the 3d model (converting it into two-dimensional, printable pieces), I use Pepakura Designer. After printing the individual parts, they are cutted using a Plotter and then glued together.

Hint: to cut out all the individual parts of my models I use a cheap but very helpful hobby plotter, which has proved to be extremely useful and time-saving. It is available at Amazon.

Cinema4D

I am working with Cinema4D for more than fifteen years now (semi professional), but I still find myself discovering new stuff almost every day. It's absolutely amazing how much functionality Maxon packed into this mighty tool while keeping a clean and intuitive user interface. For me, Cinema4D is the perfect allrounder and I use it for all kind of graphics and animations.

You think this article raised lots of questions? Or you're interested into this topic and would like to know more about? Want to express your personal oppinion? Then feel free to drop a comment here.

Author: Mike vom Mars
A couple of years ago, Mike emigrated from his home planet to Earth to study and examine the human species. His findings offer a deep insight into the nature of human beings and their strange society.

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