The main body

I've had a few busy weekends, but I can now post some of the work done.

Since I wanted to get a feel for the size of the ship, I've decided to start building it's main body.
The full ship height is roughly equivalent to a 15 floors building or ~58 meter.

I've started doing the middle part containing the inverted "Y" light as it will be used to join the 2 sides of the body. Since I'll be putting some lights in the ship, I've cut out the part of the middle section containing the lighted area (the inverted "Y"). Then I've proceeded on doing the two sides and joining everything together.

I guess one of the trick when using pepakura is to understand how you'll be folding/ gluing all the parts. It's important if you want to figure out how to make more rounded area and make your life easier. Pepakura is a very awesome tool, but when it comes to the automatic decomposition of a complicated 3D object, it lacks in sophistication. You need to do the decomposition by yourself by doing small, maleable, logical structures that you'll understand.
If you want to add some effects, or some additional pieces, you'll need to know how you'll be doing them before starting gluing parts together.

For the other projects I did in the past, I use to have flaps on the side of the pieces. These flaps would be used with glue to join two adjoining pieces. But by using the flap, since card stock is thick, it shows where you did the junction. What I decided to do for this project was to cut off all the flaps and directly glue the adjoining piece edge to edge. I use UHU super glue for this as it's cheap, does not smell toxic, dries fast and doesn't give me any funny felling if it goes on my skin. It does an amazing job if you do it correctly with a sharpened toothpick. But before doing the gluing, make sure that you've colored the edge with a marker that doesn't bleach and is chemically stable. I tend to use Faber Castell makers if they have the color I want. They're more expensive but worth it.

In my case, since I'll be putting lights in the ship by using LED, I need to paint the interior in black. The reason I need to do this, is that if I don't, light bleed through the card stock. In order, here is what I'll have to do: use regular white glue on all junction to cover all potential holes before it gets too hard to reach specific edges (it's been done on the body) and then paint the interior with black paint. Using a flash light after will show you all the regions without enough paint. Once this is done, you can move to other parts of the lighting process that I'll be presenting in another blog.

To finish this blog, I just wanted to show what my "workbench" look like.

Enjoy.

Making the right arm

Most ships, if not all, in the EVE Online universe are very detailed. But those details are not achieved by doing a very detailed 3D model as it would take too much computer juice to render all the graphics. One thing that they do is a skin where one of the channels (level of information) contains a bump map. When this bump map is processed by the computer, it gives a lot of "fake" details to an otherwise very flat surface.
Since I'm a geneticist and not a computer software engineer or a game developer, if you do not like my explanation; tough luck! Wikipedia and Google will give a way better explanation of gaming graphics mechanics.

One problem with the bump map is when printed on paper, you lose all the fancy computer graphic algorithms and it looks flat.
Behind the right arm (for those who play EVE; spin the model...) there's some kind of mechanical apparatuses. Since I thought it would be cool to give the model the most details I could, I decided to make them real parts.
Hence by randomly cutting pieces of card stock, coloring them and gluing them, I achieved what you see in the picture above.
The picture does not give it justice, but it's an evolution of the papercrafting from a 2D to a 3D model.

The finished model looks like the following 2 pictures.
I took the picture of the underside of the arm with my human figurine as I found that it gives it a lot more perspective and it looks cool as I imagine that person slowly building the ship, soldering part by part all the armor and ...

Also when I was doing the mechanical part, there was a circle in the middle that looks like a "do not X" sign.
I think, since it's the size of a human, it is an opening to the inside of the arm... but only the real ship designer will know what it is....

Since I'm up to date in all the posts, new posts will come roughly once a week when a new piece is done.

Size and Scale

Just for the fun of it I decided to start with the left side of the ship.This contains the left shield, the tubes and the cockpit.

I started with the shield as it contained my 1 man corp logo and was easy to do.
Then I proceeded with the tubes and cockpit. But in the middle of doing the cockpit, I wondered what the size of a pod and human were compared to the ship. In the left picture, you have the finished left shield, the original Pod with it's smaller brother (sized to the Tristan), a 6 feet human and a few of the cockpit parts. The right picture contains the size comparison of the tubes, a human and the Pod along with a ruler. By looking at that picture, you notice that a human, when passing from the ship main body to the cockpit (through the tubes), does not have a lot of leeway or space...

Left, right and below, you have respectfully the front window, the front part being fixed to a cockpit part and the half finished part of the cockpit. The back part of the cockpit will only be done once I figure out what I wanna do with the windows.
 I was wondering if I should only put in some mate windows or if I should do some kind of shadow play by putting figurines in it and having semi transparent windows. BTW there's going to be a few LED s lighting everything up from the inside!

What is cool about the Tristan

I always thought that the 6 "extremities" of the ship could move to give it a more aggressive stand.
Bellow is a picture of the 6 moving pieces of the ship.
I did it quickly just by deforming the moving piece so it looks a bit crappy, but it shows the essence of it.

The way I drew it, the cockpit could move in.
The 5 arms could fold back protecting the ship, reduce it's signal strength (when scanning for it) and make a more powerful overall shield.

Since I like challenge, I'll try to put a motor in it to have an offensive stand (compact) and an exploration stand (all open). I'll also be putting some light in and the beeping lights too.

Hello All,

This is the first entry to this blog about my ideals and the making of a papercraft EVE Online Tristan.
I first started doing papercrafting after I saw pupumonkey's post . He did very nice models of the Caldary Kestrel, Minmatar Firetail, Amarian Apocalypse and a Gallentean Vextor

After viewing his models, I decided to try my hand at it by doing a Pod and then a Thorax.
Now I'm doing my last model for a while and it will be a Tristan.

The ship model looks like this:

Here is a quick guide:
-Use software such as Pepakura and GIMP.
-Extract the model and skin from the EVE Online game, you need to have the game client and a software called TriExporter.
-As for the skin of the model, I use GIMP to modify it and to make it fit as the skin from the game contains multiple layers that needs to be modified for printing purpose.




Guin