This is fairly simple and doesn’t require glueing, although some precision cutting: A paper rocket made of interlocking parts:

It’s not the most stable toy, and in fact is more something to look at than to play with. However, I like the kind of minimalistic charm of it. Here is how to assemble it:
First, you have to print both sides onto carboard, i.e. you print the front first, then turn the page and insert it into the printer again and print the back. This will not be 100% aligned (the quality of the alignment depends on the paper feed mechanism of your printer). The template accounts for that by adding some bleed to the shapes. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to try to align the paper as accurately as possible. After printing and cutting, you should have five shapes:

Interlock the two rocket shaped parts like so:

That was the easy part. Now use the three disks to stabilize everything. This is an “automatically” interlocking system. The biggest disk goes into the middle, the second biggest to the bottom and the smallest to the apex of the rocket. Interlocking the disks is a bit tricky and requires some bending of the material. You will have to carefully bend the cardboard back once everything is in place. Start with the middle incision and slide it into the bottom-most incision in the rocket:

Make sure that the disk is parallel to the rocket shape, not angled, i.e. at this stage it needs to be vertically aligned, not horizontally:

Once it is in place, you have to carefully bend it upwards  on one side and downwards on the other, until the incisions on the disk and the opposing rocket part interlock:

Now carefully bend the disk into it’s original, flat shape, and you are all set:

Do it for the other two disks as well, and voila: Your own personal paper rocket, ready to take to the stars:

Here is the template in PDF format:

• Front page
• Back page

This little project is quite a contrast to the previously made P-Body- Not surprisingly, actually, as this was commissioned by a 4-year old girl. And girlish it is indeed:

A nice little cottage.

This can be used as a toy, or just for decoration.

The original template is a little small for playing, so you may consider scaling this up. The good news is that this is really easy to build. The template is fairly self-explanatory and should be doable even for young children (say, starting from 6-8 years? My four year old isn’t quite ready yet, though).

When I say, it’s little, I mean it. Here it is on a CD for size comparison:

Here is a different color scheme, less kitsch, more swedish cottage:

They go together quite well, and in fact with a little patience you can build a small town out of them. If there is sufficient interest in other color schemes, I will consider adding more. And probably new house types as well. Let’s see.

Here are the templates as PDFs, both for the white and red version:

White cottage (PDF)

Red cottage (PDF)

Ok, so this is another somewhat nerdy papercraft, matching the Frankenturrets I did some time ago. It’s P-body, one of the two coop mode robots featured in Portal 2.

This one was a bit tricky, as I had to compromise between the level of detail and complexity of the assembly. Therefore, it’s not entirely faithful to the original, but I’d say it’s close enough. On the up side, assembly is not without challenge, but very doable. One huge compromise I made was the portal gun. It’s not held by P-Body, but it’s attached to his right arm – ugh, I know. But anything more realistic would have made things really complicated.

P-body doesn’t lend itself very well to papercrafting – a spheroid body and long thin extremities aren’t exactly papercraft staples. Thus, I was quite surprised to find that this model is actually quite stable. If you do it right, it should stand firmly on its feet and will resist moderate attempts to tip it over.

You may wonder where ATLAS is, P-body’s trusted friend. Well, here is bad news: ATLAS is even more difficult, being more or less a perfect sphere. And although it may seem as if P-Body’s parts can be reused for ATLAS, in reality I would have to design most if not all parts from scratch.

Now, considering that I have very limited time for such pranks, chances of an ATLAS model are slim, very slim. At least for the forseeable future.

In the meantime, enjoy P-Body. Here is the template. It comes in two pages and results in a model of about 15cm height:

Page 1 (PDF)

Page 2 (PDF)

Don’t ask me how it came to pass, but I decided to make a papercraft chameleon. After some tweaking of the color scheme, I settled for a classical B/W and red combination.

The daughter dismissed it as a toy, lacking the cuddly factor. So I had to reluctantly move it over to the decorative department.

In the photo, it’s somewhat subtle, but the chameleon is grinning. Sort of a Cheshire Cameleon (hey, that sounds snappy – maybe I should trademark this). I still don’t know if the smile is a good idea, but for some reason I always felt that chameleons have something mischievous about them – maybe their sneaky color changing ability.

Speaking of color changing, I am quite unsure what the best option is here. After playing around with very bright, colorful combinations, I accidentally hit the black color and liked it. Still, I’m open for suggestions.

Building instructions

Building the chameleon is not that difficult. It consists essentially of two parts – the body and the head. Admittedly, the head looks somewhat confusing at first glance, but it’s not that hard to figure out where everything goes.

Start with the body, part a. First, glue the two tail parts b and c to a. Next, glue flap 6 to the opposing side. This will form a six-sided interface to the head. Keep the other flaps of part a open yet, so that it’s easier to attach the head.

Now turn to part d, the head. Glue flaps 7-11 to their opposing sides. This will form the head, with a six-sided opening that will attach to the body. The flaps of the head go into the body – that’s why you should keep the other flaps of the body unglued until the head is attached. Now, glue the head to the body.

Next, close the body by gluing all flaps 2-6 to their counter parts. Glue the two parts of the tail back-to-back.

Almost done. On to the eyes. These are simple: Carefully put them into a round shape – wrapping them around a pencil works fine. Then glue them into a cone, leaving a small hole for the ‘pupil’. Then attach them to the head, centered over the red and white spot respectively.

The final step is assembling and attaching the legs. These are pretty self-explanatory, except maybe for the first part: Fold the feet onto the adjacent square and glue them in place there. This will bring the printed side up. Then, fold the other two flaps onto the feet, fixating the shape of the legs. Then, attach the legs to the body. Use the pattern to see where exactly the legs go. Parts e and f are the hind legs, g and h are the forelegs.

Here is the template (see also instructions here):

• PDF

It’s just the PDF for now (sorry, am somewhat short on time right now), but if you’d like to have an SVG, or CDR file or if you need a template for the CraftRobo, please let me know in the comments or via the contact form.

I work with the combination of Blender and Pepakura for creating paper models. Sometimes it so happens that a seemingly perfect model in Blender has unconnected edges in Pepakura. These show up as red lines and result in a model where two faces are not connected although they should be.

There are several causes. One is that one or more vertices are duplicated, i.e. that two vertices are positioned at the same location. To fix this, go into Edit Mode, then press A to select all vertices, then press W and “Remove doubles”.

If that doesn’t help, in Edit Mode press ctrl+alt+shift+M. This selects non-manifold edges, i.e. edges where the model is open. Then press alt+M in order to merge the affected vertices.

If the problem still persists, you can recalculate the normals. Go into Edit Mode, select everything (press A), then press ctrl+N. The problem in this case is that each face of your model has an orientation. You can think of it as the “front” and “back” of the face. The so-called normal is a vector perpendicular to the plane of the face. Since the face has two sides, the normal can point in either of two directions. If a model consists of a contiguous surface where the normals of some faces are oriented differently than those of the other faces, Pepakura assumes that the surface isn’t actually contiguous (and rightly so).

In most cases, ctrl+N solves this problem automatically. However, there are some models which do not enclose a space completely, but which contain openings. In such a case, Blender may fail to orient all faces properly. You will see the problem in Pepakura by two sets of faces, one showing the texture (or face color) on the “outside”, and one showing it on the “inside” (double quotes, as technically there is no such thing as in and out for a model with openings). You can switch the orientation of the normals manually in Blender – here is a tutorial.

Blender is an excellent open-source 3D modelling application. Pepakura Designer (short: Pepakura) is a very useful tool for papercrafting, which converts 3D models to 2D templates which can be printed on paper, cut and assembled into the original 3D model.

The two are a great combination for papercrafting. In fact, I found the combination of Blender for 3D modelling, Pepakura for unfolding, Corel Draw for postprocessing, adding artwork and finetuning, and finally CraftRobo for cutting perfect. Here is the complete workflow:

First, you need to export the Blender model to the 3D Studio format understood by Pepakura.

Go to

File > Export > 3D Studio

then save the file. Then, simply open the file in Pepakura. Once you have created a satisfactory 2D pattern, the next step is to get it into Corel Draw. There are several vector export formats available in Pepakura, however all of them have some problems. I found the best one to be DXF (AutoDesk’s ‘Drawing Interchange Format’).

In Corel Draw, click on

File > Import

then select ‘DXF AutoCAD’ as file type and select the file exported from Pepakura. You will then be able to place the file into your existing page, by pressing LMB and dragging the mouse until the shape has the correct size.

Note that the DXF format separates the shapes for folding and cutting into different layers, which are preserved in Corel Draw. This is very convenient when you want to process them differently (such as assigning them to different cutting types for the Craft Robo).

One important drawback of the DXF format is that Pepakura chops up the outline of a shape into individual edges. This can be difficult to work with in postprocessing. Therefore, another option is to use the EPS format. Here, you need to carefully c0lor all cutting edges in the same color in Pepakura. This will create a contiguous outline in the EPS file. Unfortunately, the EPS file does not preserver the color information itself, so all edges – folding and cutting – are black, and you have to separate them manually.

You can now add artwork and edit the shapes, if necessary. Once that is done, you can simply send the file off to the Craft Robo for cutting. I keep the folds and cuts in different layers (see above) and assign the following cutting parameters:

Folds: Index 90lbs paper, 10cm/s, force 30, line type: Custom 1 (0.120 cm a, 0.120 cm b), Passes: 1

Cuts: Index 90lbs paper, 10cm/s, force 30, line type: 1, Passes: 2

It so happens that my Panasonic GH-1 is capable of spitting out so-called AVCHD files (with the extension .MTS). AVCHD is supposedly superior to older video encoding formats, but a lot of old software (such as Adobe Premiere Elements 3) cannot process it.

Being a strong proponent of not touching a working system, and seeing that Premiere Elements 3 still works quite well for me (except for, ahem, AVCHD import), I looked for inexpensive ways to convert such files to MPEG-2. And, lo and behold, I was successful:

There is a freeware that does the trick quite neatly, the aptly called Free-HD-Converter. Now, be careful: This piece of software is indeed free, but during installation it tries to install rather spammy looking browser toolbars. I unchecked these options (one cunningly starts with ‘accept terms and conditions’ … of the toolbar, that is).

If you avoid these toolbars, everything else seems rather fine. The user interface is very straightforward, there are several options with regard to the output format, and that’s about it. Conversion is taking some time, on my (admittedly rather old) system, the conversion frame rate is about 3 fps, which means that one minute of video takes about 10 minutes to convert.

I noticed that there are still some hits for the infrared photos I had up on the site a long time ago. Those were taken with a Canon G2 – still a nice camera, although it feels like a toy these days, now that I am used to the Panasonic GH-1. And I guess there is equipment out there, compared to which the GH-1 feels even more like a toy.

Anyway, I digress. Here are the photos – I have uploaded them to Flickr:

For an IR filter, I have used an ORWO 585. This is a lowpass filter which passes light below 790nm. It’s not completely opaque above that threshold, but you have to look at a very bright light source to see a faint violet spot through it, so for all practical purposes it works well.

As you may know, the Canon G2 – like almost all other digital cameras – has a built-in IR filter. This is because the CCD sensor is very sensitive to IR light, and would otherwise produce images which are quite different from the usually intended standard film look.

Fortunately the G2 filter is not completely opaque for IR light, so it works in general, but you have to accept long exposure times and off-the-balance autofocus. This means working with a tripod and manual focus in as bright daylight as you can get. Don’t even think about doing this on an overcast day.

Hello, test subjects – Cave Johnson here. I give you – a paper model of the Portal 2 Frankenturret. It’s somewhat finnicky to assemble, I admit that, but it will be the best Frankenturret your desk has seen in a while, I assure you.

You may want to build more than one, though, as they are social creatures, and a single one may quickly become depressed.

Then again, you might not – considering that these take quite some time to build. If you want to assemble it, here is the template (see also instructions here):

• Corel Draw: Page 1, Page 2
• PDF: Page 1, Page 2
• SVG: Page 1, Page 2

For the perfectionists among you, here is an extra: You may have noticed that the turret heads are square cubes, and therefore it is somewhat difficult to glue the ‘face plates’ to their edges and stil get a nice curvature. If you are willing to do some extra work, you can use this alternative page 1 with curved turret heads:

• Corel Draw: Alternative page 1
• PDF: Alternative page 1
• SVG: Alternative page 1

Is it worth the additional effort? Honestly I don’t think so, but I let you decide. If you like this, you may also want to have a look at my P-Body model.

Cave Johnson – we’re done here.

May I introduce you to the gentleman dinosaur:

He is as distinguished as he is obsolete. That’s the way things go these days.

If you want to assemble him, here is the template (see also instructions here):

• Corel Draw
• PDF
• PDF + GSD (Craft Robo)
• SVG