aerodactyl

Remember those awesome dinosaur model kits from when you were a kid? I’m working on a Viridian Pewter City Museum collection – Pokémon model dinosaur kits! This is the first, Aerodactyl.

I model the design in Blender first.

After making the 3D model out of flat planes, I mark out areas where the parts intersect. The model is then exported into a 2D file, using this excellent Paper Model Export script which allows me to set the scale of the complete model. After export, a number of things must be done to make each piece ready for cutting. The tail piece is shown as an example below.

Each point of interconnect initially gets exported as a normal “cut” line. This must be expanded into a 3mm wide line, and then the length of the line must be extended past the outline of the piece. Then the width of these lines is removed from the area of the piece.

Each piece is laser cut and the whole model can be assembled by slotting the correct parts together!

I need to make a lot of fixes to the design still but the overall concept works. Unfortunately the other Kanto fossils don’t really suit being made into model kits, but there are some good candidates throughout the series!