Paper Craft Chimera

A Warhammer 40K club at school has inspired me to get modelling again.  My ragtag scavenger army for battling my brother will now grow to include some militia in the style of the Imperial Guard.

I was given some Tempestus Scions for Christmas, and they are works of art.  I'm going to love building and painting them.

However, Imperial Guard rely heavily on vehicles and I resent paying huge moneys for ancient models (looking at you, Chimera).  So I started to explore making my own Chimera-like APC.

I made very low-poly models of each of the main parts (tracks, hull, turret) in Blender, then marked the seams and used UV Unwrap to make the net.  Exporting that as a .png meant I could print it out.

Except...it'd all be the wrong size.

So I imported the UV layout .png into Inkscape and scaled it.  I made a rectangle of a known dimension (e.g. 100mm long for the base of the hull), and scaled the imported png to match.  Then I could print it the correct size!

Except...Inkscape didn't handle the transparency very well, and the printout was mostly black.

So, I drew lines over the net in Inkscape and deleted the png when I was done.  That also gave me the chance to draw in tabs for gluing once it was printed.

Then the printout really worked, and I could cut, fold and stick my very own papercraft Chimera!


I've ordered some plasticard for the next stage, but I doubt I'll be able to fold that so there'll be lots more cutting and sticking involved. :/

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