Shapes are hard!

Thus far, we have scaled the helmet in Armorsmith, unwrapped the model into flat pieces, imported it into Inkscape and created rudimentary paths for our pattern or laser. Our next step is to apply some Bezier curves and a scaling box in Inkscape. The issue is, we don’t have all of our shapes finalized. 

I’ve been doing this long enough that I have a pretty good idea what that side panel SHOULD look like, but that has come from YEARS of practice. In short, lots of trial and error… Emphasis on the error. 

So, in this chapter, we are going to discuss how 3d shapes flatten out and demonstrate with a real world example. 

Meet Tiny Samus!

While I know a lot of people don’t have a 3d printer, I made this so we can demonstrate some of the principles involved. 

Wait… What’s that? Why didn’t I just print the helmet? There are a few reasons:
 1. I only own an Elegoo Centauri Carbon. It’s too small to print this entire project in one go and I would have to plastic weld it all together and that is not as strong as I would like. 
 2. It was pretty heavy. In all likelihood, this is going to be an all day wear and I don’t want something that heavy on my head for a full con day. 
 3. Smoothing that would have been a huge pain and I didn’t want to do spend all that time when I was going to have to foam craft for most of it anyway. 

So, we have Tiny Samus. I’m going to use it show why these applications (Armorsmith, Pepakura, etc) have such a hard time making a pattern from it. 

To do this we are going to start with plain blue painter’s tape. The roll I happen to have here is 3 inches wide. 

We are going to tear off a piece of tape and cover the piece we are trying to quantify. Make sure you apply the tape so it really conforms to the shape. Don’t worry about wrinkles. You are attempting to make a flat surface conform to a curved one, there is going to be some wrinkles. Take a second piece and cover the first. This will keep the wrinkles in place and make sure that the curve stays in place when we remove the tape. 

This is what I ended up with for this step. 

Next, we need to define the edge of the part. With Tiny Samus, it’s pretty easy – we have a groove at the edge of every part that makes it pretty easy to find the edges. I took my fingernail and then a letter opener to press the tape gently into the grooves. Remember to be gentle – we don’t want to tear the tape. Don’t worry, though – we can always take it off and start over. 

You can clearly see the edges of the shape there. But that crease will pull out when we remove the tape, so we need to take a sharpie and trace it. I am annoyed that I didn’t bring one of my white gel pens for this part, but this is what you should get – look closely and you can see the ink.

Then we peel it off and use some scissors to cut it out. The shape we are left with is this. 

See how that fat little bulbous shape and how it doesn’t want to lay flat? It is our job to figure out the best way to cut it. Then, we need to go in and play around with armorsmith so we can get a couple pieces out of it that will work. 

The way I have always done this is to push on it so it lays flat. While you are doing this, you will see ripples or wrinkles where it wants to curve. That is where we want to break it up. And believe it or not, we can do that in Armorsmith, we just need to know WHERE to work. 

When you first start doing this stuff, you might have to redo it a couple times, but I was able to get it done in two cuts. What I have lokes like this. 

 

Now, we need to go back into Armorsmith. Since I have cut a bunch of parts out of that model, we need to undo the unwrap. Don’t worry, this won’t change our already saved workspaces – it just resets the model so we can work on it some more. Click this button. 

Once we do that, we are going to extract that troublemaker and we are going to futz with it. The main reason I am insistent on using this specific workflow is that this specific cosplay has some REALLY complex geometry, and if we don’t get everything scaled properly and the same, it won’t fit together. EVA foam does give us a little wiggle room because it is super flexible and can be stretched and formed – but we have ot be in the ballpark. 

Keep in mind, because we decimated the model to make it easier to work with, what we can do with it is a little limited., so we will have to extrapolate in Inkscape. Here’s what I was able to do and how I did it. 

And now that we have the basic scale and shape, we are going to bring it into Inkscape and make our outlines for these parts. After we do, we should have something that looks like this. 

Now we have our ROUGH pattern pieces for Samus’ helmet. The next thing we will need to do is refine the patterns a bit. Samus’ helmet has some points, but it is mostly curves, so we need to round out those lines a bit. But that is for the next episode. 

The Complete Samus Saga

calendar November 19, 2025 category The Samus Saga Tutorials, Tutorials

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