Preparing 3d file for Armorsmith Designer
NOTE: If you are 3d printing your costume pieces, you can skip this step. Armorsmith will handle your high resolution files fine and if you use the file generated by this step, you will have a 3d printed blocky mess.
This is our first big build for the site, and we are taking you through the build from the beginning. This means that we will start with the 3D files, prepare them for work in Armorsmith Designer, unwrap them in Armorsmith, cut them on the laser, put it all together, add the lighting, paint it all and take it out to a convention.
As you probably guessed from the title, we are going to be making a Samus Aran cosplay. There is a lot of source material for this character, so after a deep dive, we decided to do a build based on her Metroid Prime armor.
There are also hundreds of examples of 3D files out there already. Our build is going to combine files from several sources. In many cases, the goal of a cosplay is to be as accurate and faithful to the source material as possible, but Samus is a bit different. She’s been in 14 games and a manga. Each team has had a slightly different vision for the bounty hunter and her armor, so a Samus cosplay is going to be less about precise recreation of the character and more about being faithful to her essence.
As we work on this build, we will be pulling files from many sources. The helmet, will be based on this file by JTM. I recommend you follow along with the tutorial so you can practice these techniques. The more you practice, the easier it will be when you work on a build of your choosing. So, go ahead and save that file where you can easily find it.
Most of the files we are going to be working with are super detailed. This is great for 3D printing, video games, animation and the like, but it really won’t work for our purposes. The unwrapping process is largely automated. The application we are going to use on the build tries to simplify the shapes to make your pattern work. The way it performs its calculations turns out some really weird shapes if the model is super detailed. In fact, we are going to be simplifying this model to the point that it looks like a Playstation 1 model.
Believe it or not, this is going to make it much easier on us in the next episode.
We have the model for the helmet, and we are ready to simplify it. The process is called “decimation.” This is because, technically, decimate means “to reduce drastically especially in number.” Every 3D application worth using has this functionality. As far as I know, it’s called the same thing in all of them, but I could be wrong.
For this tutorial, we are going to be using Blender.
SIDE NOTE: I am not very good with Blender. I am working on it, but we aren’t quite there, yet. Everything I know how to do is extremely specific and learned for a specific process.
Go to blender.org, download the application and get it installed. Once you do that, open the program. You should see something that looks like this.
Click anywhere outside the Blender popup window and it will go away. You should see this:
Click on that cube. It will be outlined in orange. Hit the delete key. That will remove it from the scene.
Now, go to the file menu and select import. The file I pointed you at is an STL file, so click on STL. Navigate to your Samus helmet file, select it, and click Import.
Due to the measurement settings in Blender, you won’t see your file in the scene window. Roll the wheel on your mouse backwards – this will zoom out, and you should see your helmet model now.
If you click with the middle mouse button and drag, you can move the camera around the model. I recommend getting your view to look like this:
Now we need to DECIMATE THE FILE! *Bwahahaha!!!*
The process is pretty simple. First make sure your tool is set to Select Box Tool. It’s in the left hand side Tool palette and looks like this:
Click on the helmet. It should have an orange outline around it, indicating that it is selected.
To add the decimate modifier, go to the lower right hand side of the application. You should see the Properties window. It looks like this:
With the helmet selected, we are going to click on the little wrench-looking icon. That is the Modifiers panel. You should see this:
Click on that “Add Modifier” button. Click Search. Then type in “Decimate.” Click on Decimate, and it is going to add the decimate modifier to the panel. It should look like this:
We are going to leave it on Collapse. There are other options, but they are esoteric magics and wholly unsuited for what we are doing.
What we are concerned with is the ratio. 1.0000 is the model as it was designed – 100% of the detail. We are going to make this number smaller, which will remove vertices/detail from the model. There is no hard and fast rule for this step. You need to play with it until you get the results you want.
For this model, I pushed it to .019. This is 1.9% of the original vertices. It’s going to seem pretty rough, but it’s perfect for our needs. You should see something that looks like this:
See all of those lovely triangles? That is what we want it to look like. You can play around with the decimate modifier and try to get a better result if you want. Just make sure that you examine the model from all directions. You want to make sure the geometry isn’t doing something weird.
That’s all there is to it. You have decimated your model in preparation for unwrapping.
With the model selected (the orange outline), click on the File menu and select Export. Select Wavefront .obj). Put it in the same place as the original STL file. We will need it for Episode 2.
Here is a video of everything we just did.
October 5, 2025
