Using Armorsmith Designer to Generate a Rough Pattern
Now that we have that helmet on our avatar and scaled, it’s time to make a rough pattern out of it. This process is, like the rest of cosplay, more of an art than science. You need to be able to think through the process to the end product. This allows you to make decisions that will result in an awesome build.
Armorsmith Designer is an extremely powerful tool hiding behind a deceptive exterior. However, it does have its limitations, which will become clear once we get into the process of unwrapping the helmet to make a pattern from it. Due to this, we will have to do some “post processing” and cleanup to get a pattern and laser cut file.
But that is a problem for Future Feral®!
In all seriousness, we will cover what to do with these files after we are done unwrapping the helmet. I just wanted to give you a bit of a warning before there was disappointment in the product that Armorsmith Designer puts out.
NOTE: If you intend to 3d print your costume, you can go right to printing it now.
We are going to pick up right where we left off in Episode 2.
Before we dive into the tutorial, it is necessary to explain the following: crating patterns is an art form. There are very few hard and fast rules involved, but for the most part, you will have to work from your gut. As you progress in the art of cosplay, you will eventually develop a feel for what will and will not work right. That is why we strongly urge everyone to make a mock up from poster board, card stock or even old broken down boxes before using the pattern on your final material.
First of all, this will give you a feel for how the pieces will fit together. It will also let you know if there will be any parts that are going to be a challenge to get into the build. Lastly, it will let you see if you made a mistake in your pattern making before you waste money.
CONFESSION TIME: This will be the 4th time I have cut this specific helmet out of EVA foam. The first one was a pattern that I bought from elsewhere and it was not very good. I wasn’t happy with the finished product. The second one… I scaled wrong. It would fit our dog – Finn. The next one… I SCALED WRONG AGAIN… I am a large mammal and this thing made me look like a toddler. So, in this tutorial series, you are getting the benefit of all of my wasted materials.
So. You should have something that looks like this. Please note, my shoulders are attached now!
If your helmet isn’t selected, click on it. You will know that it is selected because it gains an orange outline and the fields in the transforms information panel populate. Now, up at the top left corner, you will see a tab marked “Patterns.”
You should see something like this.
Click on the right most icon over the grid – “unfold geometry into patterns.” Provided we didn’t mess up in Blender, this shouldn’t take too terribly long and should give us a pretty good result. Click on the window with the grid and used your mouse wheel to scroll out. You should see something almost identical to this.
Congratulations! There’s your pattern. On to the build!
What’s that? Your pattern looks like an unassembled horror from the deep? Yeah, about that… I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. Mine looks like that, too.
In a perfect world, that one click would be all that we had to do, but we live in this one. Armorsmith Designer is turning every surface in the helmet into a pattern piece – most of which we don’t need. Let me explain – all the teeny details are getting their own pattern pieces. So are the inside surfaces… ALL of it. So, we are going to go through and grab what we NEED to build this helmet.
This is where the art comes in. There is no one “this is the only way to do it” method. Patterns can be broken up in so many ways that every tutorial is going to give you a different method. You have to learn and figure out what parts are necessary and what parts are not. We are going to generate a pattern that we will then clean up and convert to laser file/cut pattern.
So, when we are doing this, we need figure out what we can get rid of. Or rather, we need to figure out what we are going to keep. This process is actually pretty easy, but not entirely intuitive. You can see the helmet on the left and the unfolded section on the right.
NOTE: If we hadn’t simplified the model, Armorsmith Designer would be breaking these manageable pieces into smaller pieces with weird breaks in it in an attempt to make folding the curves easier to accomplish. While this can be useful, it makes it really hard to cut your patterns by hand. A laser can handle it, but assembly gets… well… downright silly.
The Process
Since this model is symmetrical, we can concentrate on one side. We are going to start working from the center line of the model and work our way to the outside of the model. That way we make sure we get everything that we need.
Hold down the right mouse button and rotate the helmet model until it looks like this.
See all the heavy black lines? Each of those is a different section of the model. Each section is a shape on the grid on the right hand side of the screen. When we click on a section on the left, the corresponding shape on the right is selected and outlined in orange. Like this.
So… the first thing we are going to want to do is make our work a little easier. There are a lot of things that we don’t need from this model. We don’t need the grooves on the model – they will be in our finished helmet, but that groove is made up of 3 pieces (the bottom and sides of the trench). We don’t need the faces that are the edges of the visor hole.
In the case of the groove, we are going to add some foam on the outside of our helmet to make the grooves perfect. In all honesty, there are a few ways to do those grooves – adding thin foam on the outside, using a router bit with a rotary tool, or cutting the grooves out with an craft knife. Each of these techniques has its benefits and drawbacks. Since the helmet is a bunch of curved surfaces and is difficult to attach a guide to, I feel the router/rotary tool is a good way to ruin a lot of work and materials. Due to my muscle tremors and the aforementioned inability to mount a guide on the helmet, I also feel like the craft knife option is going to be a bad idea.
So, we are going to be adding an additional layer of thin foam to make our grooves. It allows us to make some simple adjustments to the pattern and cut that foam with the laser for precision.
The reason we don’t need the inside faces of the visor cut out is because we will be making the helmet out of 10mm foam. That inside surface will already be modeled in our final build.
Before we do anything else, we need to make sure that the shapes we are working with are solid ones and not all wonky. To do that, we hit the w key. This “welds” edges together and prevents some of the weirdness from popping up while working with the patterns. Input “10” and hit enter. This takes the little gaps that Armorsmith puts in for accommodating the curves (the ones that are almost impossible to cut or glue) and pins them together if they are with in 10 mm of each other.
Now, we are going to extract sections of the helmet to a new pattern grid. To do that, click on the section of closest to the center line of the helmet. You should see something that looks like this.
The red section on the left is the shape highlighted on the right.
What we are going to do next is the essence of this whole process. Right click on the part that is highlighted in the grid view and select “sent to” then “new workspace.” This is going to create a separate grid view for the pattern we are extracting and put that part in there.
Name that new workspace something like “Samus Helm Pattern Extracted.” Now, click ok and you should see something that looks like this.
That is our first official pattern piece.
It doesn’t seem like much, but from such humble beginnings and all that.
On the top right hand side (the workspaces window), click on our original file name “Samus_-_No_-_Visor.” This will take you back to the model we are extracting pieces from. You should see this now.
That big gap in the front is the piece we just moved over to our other workspace. If you click where we took that piece from, you will select the inside surface. Go ahead and do that. Then hit delete. I recommend deleting the inside surfaces as we work to keep from accidentally adding parts we aren’t going to use.
It should look like this.
Pretty cool, right?
NOTE: What we do in Armorsmith does not effect our original files at all.
This is pretty much the process. We click on a section. Send it to our other work space in steps until we have half of our helmet. Only half because we are going to mirror the pieces to insure that there are no inconsistencies in the geometry that would lead to it not being symmetrical in the finished product.
Click on the next section and you should see something like this.
See how that selected both sides of the helmet? Well, look at the grid view. That huge long piece is what we selected. That piece would be almost impossible to cut, but for now, we are going to send that over to our other workspace. Remember how to do that?
Right click on the selected piece on the grid view, select “Send To” and then select the workspace we created in the previous step.
Please note that it won’t take you to that workspace automatically after you create it. So let’s go look at what we have.
And by looking at this workspace, it should be clear what we are doing now. By sending the pieces to this workspace, we are able to select the bits we want to keep and assemble the model here in the extracted workspace.
We’re going to go back over to the original workspace and repeat this process till we have everything we need to put the helmet together. The photo below is what the model in my “Samus_-_No_-_Visor” workspace looks like when I am done.
And this is what my extracted workspace should look like.
Believe it or not, this is exactly where we need to be.
We are almost done with getting the base of our pattern, but there is still a long ways to go before we are ready to cut this out (either with a blade or a laser).
There are a couple touch ups we can do in Armorsmith that will make future you very happy. First of all, I noticed that the pattern piece for this part was kinda wonky.
See that little dangly bit off the end there? It tells me that some of the faces we don’t need for this build got grouped with it. So we are going to fix that.
With the part selected, you can pivot the helmet around until we see the offending triangle. See it up in there, tucked into the venting? Click on it. Now you can see where that is on the grid view.
The next step is very fiddly. Above the grid view, there are a series of icons. The second one is the Join/Cut tool.
Click on the tool to activate it. Now take your mouse over to the offending triangle. Notice how the edges of the triangles turn blue when the tool is active? That means we can cut that part off to be it’s own separate piece. I recommoend pivoting all around and seeing if a single cut will have the desired effect. I found an edge that if I cut it, it separates that entire silly tail.
It’s right here.
Click it. You know you want to. Suddenly, everything is deselected. Click on the tool icon again to deactivate it. When you select the cowling on the cheek of the helmet, the tail shouldn’t be selected with it. Go ahead and click on the tail in the grid view. Now delete it. This is one of those fiddly things that we are going to have to make adjustments on as we go.
Go ahead and click on this icon. It’s going to shuffle all the pattern pieces down to a smaller arrangement. The automatic arrangement tools are good for the time being.
Before we go any farther – SAVE YOUR WORK! This will save a costume file that you can reload later as we add parts to the costume.
The last thing we need to do before moving on is to measure the grooves in the helmet.
Go back to the “Samus_-_No_-_Visor” workspace and zoom in on the helmet til you are pretty close to the groove in the center of the helmet. Then, select the “Measure” tool above the grid view.
With the measure tool active, click on on edge of the groove and then click on the other edge. When you do, you will get a measurement. It will look like this.
Write that gap down. It’s half a centimeter, or 5 millimeters. That groove is important to our build, and we are going to have to add a little bit to the 10mm foam we are using for the base for this build. The parts we cut out are literally the top surface, so they will be the bits we cut from a thinner foam to add the grooves.
You can go around and measure all of the grooves, but they look close enough that we can call them all 5mm for the build.
To make our lives easier later, go down to the property grid in the lower right hand corner and make sure that “Show Registration Marks” and “Show Edge Ids” are both marked true.
Now, go to File. Select Export > Unfold > DXF (Not DXF per page). This will save the pattern as a vector graphic. I could go into detail about what a vector graphic is and the difference between raster and vector files is, but it’s not strictly necessary. For our uses, a vector is used to create the pattern (as well as the laser cuts).
We are done in Armorsmith for now.
In our next tutorial we will clean up our pattern and add the necessary bits to make this helmet.
Happy Crafting!
October 15, 2025
