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Papercraft-inspired math turns any sheet into any shape
You might not need exotic manufacturing techniques to produce custom-shaped objects. If Harvard scientists have their way, you could start with little more than a sheet and some math. They've created a math framework that borrows from the Japanese papercraft technique of kirigami (which uses strategic cuts to produce art) to transform any sheet into any shape. Effectively, it involves designing backwards -- the intended shape is the last part of the process.
ICYMI: One Pen to rule all and video you can manipulate
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab formulated a way to interact with existing videos, so they can prod and move objects within the frame. The Cronzy Pen samples colors from anything, anywhere, and mixes its own ink the match any shade. It's on IndieGoGo now so good luck scoring your crowdfunded thing. If you want to check out video of Jupiter's moon Io, the Washington Post explained it all well; and the charming paper craft animations from yelldesign are here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
It's Friday, so make yourself an adorable little papercraft Mac
You've worked hard all week, so why not treat yourself and your desk to a cheerful bit of papercrafting? As far as papercraft projects go, this one is about as simple as it gets, but it's still pretty darn adorable. Just download the pattern in PDF form, print it, cut it, and enjoy your new friend!
Craft your own paper Journey traveler
If anyone would know how to make an adorable hooded traveler out of paper, it's the art director for Journey, Matt Nava. Nava created a step-by-step guide to crafting your own traveler, oragami-style, and developer thatgamecompany shared it with the world on Facebook. Scroll through the comments to see some fans' completed figures, big, small, colorful and blank. Click the image below for a large version of the origami instructions. [Image: Matt Nava]
Create your own papercraft Treasure Goblin from Diablo III
The folks on the Diablo III team have decided to wish everyone a happy holiday with a fun gift -- a papercraft Treasure Goblin complete with treasure bag. This delightful and kind of creepy little guy, appropriately dubbed Lewt, is free to download on the Diablo III site. Included along with the printable sheets are step by step directions to putting both Lewt and his treasure bag together, just in time for the holidays. Once construction is complete, you can fill Lewt's treasure bag with whatever bits of treasure you think the little guy would appreciate. And once you've done that, be sure to take some pictures of Lewt in action. Tweet your photos @Diablo with the hashtag #WHERESMYLEWT to show off your photos, and you could find yourself on the official Twitter or Facebook -- Blizzard will be sharing submitted photos, as well as photos of their own, throughout the rest of the holidays. For more information, the downloadable printout, and instructions, visit the official website.
Robot made from paper spells doom for the trees in the Robopocalypse (video)
A paper tiger might have a bark that's worse than its bite, but that proverb might not be valid once you've seen the Mechanical Paper Robot. The brainchild of artist / genius Kikousya, it's entirely constructed from dead trees, a few rubber bands and some dowel. We suggest you watch the amazing video after the break and, if you're looking to build your own, head down to the source link for the instructions. After all, given the cost of those robotic bulls, scary babies and giant mecha, Skynet's gonna need some wallet-friendly foot-soldiers for the Robopocalypse.
Visual Spicer creates a 7-foot tall papercraft Gundam, films the entire process as a timelapse (video)
Believe it or not, the massive seven-foot Gundam you're looking at was mostly constructed out of paper -- 720 sheets, to be exact. The papercraft artist behind the model, Taras Lesko (aka Visual Spicer), began creating it nearly a year ago, and estimates that it took him about 350 hours and four to five months to complete. As explained on his video commentary, the process started with building a store-bought model for photographs, using the shots to render it in 3D on his computer. After that, he created various templates using a variety of programs, which were then printed, cut and assembled into place. Notably, the final product has 1,250 total parts, weighs in at about 10 pounds and packs an internal 12-piece foamboard skeleton to stand. All of that is only the part of the final product, though. Taking it a few steps further, he created a bevy of "fantasy shots" (like the one above) with his brother, Ivan -- and of course, Photoshop -- and even filmed both endeavors as timelapse videos. According to Taras, the aim was to make something "bigger and better" than the four-foot papercraft Gundam, which he made nearly three years ago and burned to ashes on video prior to this project -- we'd say mission accomplished. You'll find the construction timelapse video after the break, along with more related vids and photos at the source link below. [Thanks, Christos]
Donkey Kong Country Returns in papercraft form
This Donkey Kong Country Returns diorama perfectly captures the essence of the game: DK and Diddy are bravely attempting to grab a puzzle piece, and are about to be killed by an annoying enemy.
Life-size Travis Touchdown papercraft is unsettling and rad
Well, here we are. Until someone builds an entire, sustainable city out of construction paper and tissues, we're pretty sure we've witnessed the ultimate opus from the papercraft community: A life-size model of No More Heroes hero, Travis Touchdown. Check out this masterfully intricate, somewhat-upsetting-in-a-Max-Headroom-kind-of-way statue over on Instructables. While we know Travis Touchdown is a total dreamboat, we wouldn't recommend creating one of these on your own for carnal purposes. See, there'd be two major problems with that: Papercuts That's really gross
EVE Online player creativity -- Papercraft pod edition
Every month, EVE Online developer CCP Fallout trawls the forums to find the best of the community's creative efforts. Previous editions of the Celebrating the Creative Player blog have looked at in-game news websites, a Gallente shuttle remade in Minecraft, and the cross-platform Python Fitting Tool. This month's bumper edition starts off with one of my favourite recent creations -- a flowchart designed to help players pick what they want to do in EVE. Each option is linked to further reading on the topic, making it a handy tool for new players who find themselves lost in EVE. Also impressing the devs this month is a tool designed to track the bounties gained from missions. It's often difficult to work out what the most profitable missions are to run, and this tool simplifies that by recording a log of bounties on each mission. My personal favourite highlight this month was EVE player Guindel Angeline's papercraft escape pod. We've seen some incredible papercraft EVE ships before, but I think this is the first time someone's made the escape pod.
Canon AE-1 and EOS 5D Mark II reincarnated in papercraft form, DIYers welcome to replicate
If you know us, you'd know that we're huge fans of papercraft. It's one of the simplest forms of DIY design expression, but something about it just screams adorable. To that end, we're having somewhat of a panic attack after viewing these -- three famed Canon bodies, all reborn as paper models with an insane level of detail. The Canonflex, AE-1 and EOS 5D Mark II are all present, and they're being offered up to the tinkering public as part of the company's 50th anniversary in producing SLRs. Hit the links below if you're ready to get your fold on, but be mindful that these are PDFs we're directing you to.
Craft your own Minecraft papercraft crafts
If you just can't get enough Minecraft -- and, let's face it, you can't -- then these adorable papercraft models are for you! As an added bonus, the models are so simple and boxy that there's no way you'll super glue your fingers together trying to make a stupid, impossible-to-build Companion Cube. [Image credit: jumbso]
Inhabitat's Week in Green: speed demon saws, emergency bras, and the pedal-powered monorail
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. This week China blazed a trail for green transportation as their newest train smashed the world record for high-speed rail travel. We also showcased a cutting edge vehicle powered by six circular saws and saw Google invest 1 million dollars in Shweeb's bicycle powered monorail - we can't wait to give it a spin! We also saw big things brewing for alternative energy as wave power lit up the US energy grid for the first time and Stanford scientists unveiled a new type of nanotech solar cells that can produce ten times more electricity than standard PV's yet are thinner than a wavelength of light. Adobe also kept step with the latest in energy tech by upgrading its campus with a dozen Bloom Box fuel cells, and Volvo unveiled plans to create a new type of car body that doubles as a battery! In other news, this week we spotted a great crop of green gadgets including an "emergency bra" that doubles as a gas mask, a flexible new type of electronic skin, and a stunning collection of recycled speaker art, fit to mount on your wall. We also rounded up our five favorite eco gadgets for guys and we ooh'd and aww'd at these incredibly detailed scooters made out of paper!
Super fan-made paper Mario and Luigi
It's our sincere hope that if the Super Mario Bros. ever actually did show up in our world, they wouldn't look anything like Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo -- instead, we'd really prefer they look something like what you see above: Two papercraft statues put together by DeviantArt-ist TouchFuzzyGetDizzy. Definitely click the Source link below to see these guys as big as possible. The actual statues are 40 and 50 centimeters tall, and with the detail on them, you're probably looking at quite a bit of paper. If you want to try cutting, folding, and pasting them together yourself, you're welcome to -- the creator has uploaded patterns of each, though he warns that there are no instructions to go along with them yet. Elsewhere in his gallery, you can see more angles of Luigi, as well as models of Aryll and Salvatore from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Very cool. The best thing we ever made with paper? The football from ... er ... Tecmo Bowl.
World of WarCrafts: Rock, paper, scissors
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; email lisa (at) wow (dot) com with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations. World of WarCrafts brings you arts and crafts around a theme this week: rock, paper and scissors. First up: "rock" -- a ceramic wind rider cub from Lakira of US Area 52. "I made this statue in my HS ceramics art class as an extra project," writes Lakira. "He's made out of clay and painted with acrylics. I later added some brown felt fur for his little mane; I didn't have any faux brown fur, but I think he looks better with the felt!" "I toiled over a few weeks, working out his design and hoping he wouldn't chip or break -- or even worse, blow up in the kiln," Lakira continues. "After he was finally fired, I had to finish painting him fast, in fear of someone stealing him. It's happened before, blah! I've never done anything really on this scale before; I've made tiny fel hound figures, but that was about it." Our verdict: adorable! Follow us past the break for more rock, paper, scissors crafts.
Run to your printer for Bit.Trip Runner papercraft
Gaijin Games and Paper Foldables have provided us with an activity with which we can keep busy while waiting for the May 17 release of Bit.Trip: Runner. In anticipation of the chiptune-soaked, sidescrolling action game starring Commander Video, Gaijin posted the template for this papercraft Runner diorama. If you throw it across the room, it'll kind of look like the game in motion! But there's no way we'd ever do that after spending hours meticulously cutting, folding, and gluing this model together. In fact, we're just going to get some of that puzzle glue to drench this with. If you like building papercraft Bit.Trip models, there's a Commander Video, too, also created by Paper Foldables.
Flickr Find: Papercraft Steve Jobs
I love this -- papercraft artist Jay Hauf has constructed a little papercraft Steve Jobs cutout. Over on his Flickr account, he's posted a picture that you can print out, cut out, and then fold up into the form of our favorite CEO. The little figure even comes with a paper iPhone, though I guess if you want (and if you're a little skilled with Photoshop), you could put an iPad or another Apple product in there. It does look pretty great -- somehow, even with that big blockhead and all of the other weird shapes on the "Cubee," those eyes and that black turtleneck with jeans make it clear right away who you're looking at. Excellent work there. [via iPhone Savior]
Nintendo sends glorious papercraft with Glory of Heracles
Nintendo got Paon's Glory of Heracles into my house the same way the Greeks got soldiers into Troy: with a Trojan Horse. Although this horse was in a box, so the elaborate ruse really didn't play into my acceptance of the item. And thankfully, the cartridge didn't murder me after emerging. As has become the company's custom of late, Nintendo cutely packaged its review copy of Glory of Heracles with the cartridge hidden away inside the papercraft horse. Along with the horse and the empty game case, Nintendo sent a scroll -- a letter from the immortal Greek demigod himself, exhorting us to retrieve the cartridge and help him regain his memories. Embark upon a grand looking-at-pictures adventure in our gallery. Does anyone else find it hilarious and kind of adorable to imagine Nintendo PR staff carefully cutting, folding and gluing a bunch of papercraft horses? %Gallery-83133%
The best of WoW.com: January 6-13, 2010
It's been a busy week over at WoW.com and in the WoW world. We've heard from our sources late last week that the internal friends and family alpha will be beginning for the next World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. And while this has lots of people excited, chances are you probably will never get in -- unless you know someone. There were also lots of other interesting stories this past week, from the WoW movie being pushed up thanks to Spider-Man's demise, to security holes and care packages, to papercrafts that prove none of us have any real artistic talent. The best of WoW.com for the week is after the break.
World of WarCrafts: The world of papercraft
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_The_World_of_Papercraft'; New from the Department of Old News (wait ... wut?): We're still nuts about papercrafting. While we've spotlighted papercraft before on the site, we haven't featured it specifically on World of WarCrafts. Never let it be said that World of WarCrafts left a creative stone unturned! Papercrafting is not the same thing as origami, which is the Japanese art of folding paper into intricate representations, preferably without cutting or glue. Papercrafting, in contrast, is the process of creating scale models from heavy, pre-printed paper or stock. Craftsy types download patterns rated by difficulty from sites such as World of Warcrafts Unofficial Papercrafts. Site manager Pascal was profiled last year by the Blizzard's official European WoW community site. We talked to Pascal recently for a fresh spin on WoW papercrafting. %Gallery-20544%
