T-45D Right Knee papercraft

So today I made the right knee for the T-45D power armor from Fallout 3.


The process for papercraft is pretty simple. The only downside is that it's a royal pain.

First, you get your .pdf or pepakura file (you can download pepakura here), scale it to your size (I've never done this in adobe, but in pepakura it's rather easy), and print it out.

Now comes the first pain in the ass. Take a red and blue ballpoint pen, and a short ruler.



Notice how one line is dashed, and the other goes dot-dash-dot-dash? Well that means one line gets folded up, and the other is folded down. The dot-dash is folded up (known as a valley fold) and the dash is folded down (known as a mountain fold). So you take your blue pen and your ruler, and all the valley folds are drawn across with it. Like so:



Then, once every line is marked (be sure to press hard, scoring the paper makes folding MUCH easier), then the huge pain in the ass comes. Cutting it all out.

I'm gonna assume everyone reading this has taken an arts and crafts class, so they should know how to cut out shapes :D

This is the end result:



Then you fold them all into shape, again with blue lines being valleys and reds being mountains. Unfortunately the only picture I took of the pieces folded came out looking like crap, so I can't show you that, but you'll all figure it out lol.

Then comes the only good part. The gluing. If you're like me, this is the most enjoyable because its the part where you actually start constructing it, and it's a lot like a puzzle.

I always start with the pieces that glue to themselves, putting them into shape, and then moving on to the pieces that glue to other pieces.



One piece completely finished:



More gluing



Finished!