The Samus Saga Tutorials

The Studio is Moving We just purchased a new home with a full workshop! Currently, everything is set up in a cramped spare bedroom. At the new place, we will have a fiber arts studio and a workshop for the laser, printers and the messy stuff.  It was a hard decision, but we are not […]

It’s time to cut some foam! Now that we have our patter, we need to cut out the pieces before assembly. Due to the nerve damage in my hand, is is extremely difficult for me to do this on the best of days. My hand twitches, and the specific motions needed for cutting foam cause […]

This is why we prototype Before I cut my pieces out of EVA foam, I always cut a prototype out of cardboard, paper or posterboard. First of all, it gives me a chance to figure out how it is going to fit together and whether or not I need to assemble things in a very […]

Let’s turn all this into a pattern/laser cut file. We’ve got it all set up and scaled, now it is time to make this into a pattern. The steps are pretty simple: 1. We need to label everything. This means assigning names in our layers. 2. We need to arrange everything into a visually pleasing […]

We are ALMOST there, I promise! At this point, we could export our shapes from Inkscape to PDF as a pattern, or into Lightburn for cutting, but there is the matter of the grooves in surface of the helmet. As I have mentioned before, there are a couple ways to handle this. One is subtractive […]

Filling in the gaps NOTE: I started using new Key display software today. I ddn’t realize that I had moved it so far down that it was out of my recording window until I was editing the video for this episode. I have fixed it for future recordings.  I am looking at our pattern and […]

Is it soup yet? We’ve found our model, we’ve scaled it to our body, we’ve extracted parts, traced the shapes and figured out the really hard shape… We are ready to cut the foam and build the helmet, right?  The short answer is, “No.” The long answer is, “Almost.” now that we have those shapes […]

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 […]

I used Armorsmith Designer, now what? I hear you over there asking “I exported it from Armorsmith Designer, so I am ready to cut my pattern and put it together, right?” I wish, but it isn’t that simple. We have our shapes, but not really in a form we can use. So, this step is […]

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 […]