A Little Green Man

[Revell-Fan]

Hello, my friends! This is my first paper figure and another World Premiere. I hope you like it.

The model I present here is a combination of two models I found on the SketchUp Warehouse site. Both show the same character, however, the first one has a good pose but a strange head, the second one has a bad pose and a (very) good head. So I deleted the bad head and put the good head onto the good pose figure.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Tweaking the texture

At this point I assume that you already know what character I am talking about: Yoda from Star Wars. He is my favourite character from the series and when I saw these models, something (or someone) just forced me to interrupt all other projects and to make this one. I can tell you, these Jedi mind tricks are dreadful!

When I took a close look at the details to see where the figure could be split into buildable parts I noticed that the texture of the bad pose figure was better than the good pose figure. I examined the texture maps and found out that the good head figure featured single texture maps for the eyes, the clothing and the skin whereas the other figure had only one map for everything. As a result of this the quality of the texture was fairly poor. I intended to change that.

Fortunately the maps were organised in the same way so that they were virtually identical - and adabtable. It was the resolution that made the difference. So I enlarged all texture maps to the maximum size that can be handled by SketchUp and Pepakura (1024 pixels a side). Then I resized the single higher-res texture maps so that they fit into the formerly low-res texture map and baked it all together. The last step was to reload the refined map - et voilà - the texture resolution was nearly doubled. And it shows as you can clearly see in the attached pics.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Tweaking the mesh

Unfortunatley the mesh was not perfect either. There were many tiny holes in the surface which had to be closed before anything could be unfolded. I added new faces and filled them with a green colour. After unfolding these areas were edited in TheGimp to restore the missing texture. The nostrils were the hardest parts because of their small size and dark colours. The picture shows the fixed areas (white triangles).

Furthermore, there were many intersections. Especially the arms had to be extensively reworked.

 

[Revell-Fan]

General assembly

Despite my expectations the hands were the hardest parts. The right hand almost killed me. I had to unfold it three times. The final version is still very difficult to assemble but at least successful.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The feet were a lot easier.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Whenever possible I cut off the flaps at the mountain folds. I glued the pieces from behind with paper strips to achieve a smooth finish. Here comes the head.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Assembling the head segments.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Assembly of the ears was very tricky because of the pointed tips. There was practically no room for pressing the parts together. But I took my time and covered all imperfections with water colours later on.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The lower torso was a walk in the park. I thought about adding an internal framework, however, I wanted to get the figure ready asap and skipped that idea. Fortunately the figure holds its position without support.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The upper torso was a bit more challenging because of the curved collar.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The arms had some really funky foldings.

 

[Revell-Fan]

I used a rubber band and a paper tube to make the head rotatable so that Yoda may look into different directions.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The eyes were printed on glossy paper to make them shine. I considered adding a concave eyeball so that the eyes would follow the viewer but thought this would be somewhat scary or irritating.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The accessoires

The pockets were redesigned and scaled up to look more authentic. The pins are two pairs of brass clamps used for closing padded envelopes.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The flute around his neck was attached with a blue ribbon.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The walking stick. It was the first part to be assembled.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Final build

And this is the final build. The figure stands 45 cm tall which makes a scale of about 1:1,3 (3:4). I feared the texture would not look good any more if I made the figure any larger. However, it looks so great that I consider scaling the plans up to get a life-size figure. At that scale you might consider wrapping real fabric around the body and attaching real pockets.

 

[Revell-Fan]

I am currently revising the plans and writing the assembly instructions. So stay tuned for any news. Till then, enjoy the pics!

 

[Wojtee]

The pictures are really life-like! Great job on both designing and building this green guy

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

This is simply AMAZING!!!
As always you have done an OUTSTANDING job on this one.
Granted, it may only be paper, but there is life to this model and it shows.
The photos of him in the woods are GREAT!!!
BTW, when did you take a holiday in Dagobah?
Keep up the GREAT WORK!!!