How To: Pepakura!!

Pepakura is a paper modeling software and method for building things, which is a common way for fans to make cool cosplays of their favorite characters. Halo armor is possibly the most common thing constructed using the Pepakura method. First, you want some supplies. You definitely want a self healing cutting mat. This will extend the lifetime of the extra x-acto blades you are also gonig to buy. A metal straight edge is also recommended. You are going to want to buy 110 lb cardstock to print these on; regular paper is too flimsy, and cannot support the weight of the structure you are building. Later, you will also need a hot glue gun with plenty of extra glue.

Next, follow the links in resources to get either pepakura viewer or designer (I recommend both. They're free). After downloading the software, go to the 405th.com and become a member, which is free. You can find links to these places under resources. After making an account, go to the file archive and browse the available armor pieces. Download the ones you like and open them using the Pepakura designer or viewer. If you want to scale the object to your body size, look up a sizing tutorial, as there are several on Youtube. When open, It should look like this:

When you go to print on your card, don't worry, the program won't print the image on the left, but the templates on the right. You are going to want to buy 110 lb cardstock to print these on; regular paper is too flimsy, and cannot support the weight of the structure you are building. Now it is time for cutting! There will be three types of lines on the print out: Solid, dotted, and dashed. 

Cut on all of the solid lines. at the end you should end up with something like this: 

Before gluing, you need to prepare the folds. That is what the dotted and dashed lines mean. The dotted lines equate to a mountain fold, which looks like this: ^. And the dashed lines equate to a valley fold which looks like a V. Now it's time to glue. There are numbers all along the edges, and they tell you what pieces line up with what. for example, if there is a 21 on one edge, and a 21 on another, those two edges get glued together. As you have noticed, there are several tabs that are just used to glue the pieces together. 

After gluing them all together, you get a whole armor piece. In this case, I mad a low definition forearm piece of the MJOLNIR Mark VI armor. 

The higher definition they are, the smaller the pieces, which means more time cutting and gluing. Here is a medium detail forearm for the opposite arm that I made recently. 

These are the the other medium detail forearm along with some ultra high detail hand plates that I have already made. 

Sadly, they are all being scrapped, because I am going to swap the forearms with ultra high detail models, and the hand plates were scaled to large. So that is like 16 hours down the drain. On the bright side, those are just "practice" rounds for when I am making the real deal. I plan to have a full suit completed by Halloween 2016, and after that, I can bring the armor to some Cons. 

After the model has been fully put together, you need to use fiberglass resin to coat the card to make it hard and rigid. Then automotive bondo is used for fine detailing, along with several layers of paint. 

But all of that is for another day. :)