One thing that's most frustrating to me with papercraft is that I'm a far better designer than I am a builder. I have evil fat-hands... they are evil, and they are fat.

Still, I decided to get at least ONE model I've recently bought put together today before getting back to my bash/mod stuff. This is Ebble's APC from the patrol set. This is just a a plain build with no mods, just seeing how he puts things together. I had minor issues with the underside, sadly... Also, my fat-hands kept some things gluing at bad angles. I'm really jealous of everyone here who seems to get things so perfect all the time. :S

Not too bad. Thanks for sharing. Edging is your friend. It helps to make the model look better and even can hide minor mistakes. You should edge before gluing, but this might benefit from post-glue edging since it is already built.

Edit: Seems I was Ninja'd

Nice job.

I'm not the best builder in the whole world myself, and I've found some things to help a lot:

1. Edging hides a lot of sins. I stopped using black markers a long time ago and I use Tombow brush tipped markers. When you find a color that's close enough, it really makes a remarkable difference in how clean the build looks. I put together an easy color matching/reference aid here: http://www.ebblesminiatures.com/downloa ... ux3000.zip

2. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer sometimes--it only took me seven years, but I finally stumbled upon a super easy way to do wheels. I don't bother scoring the treads crosswise, I just score lengthwise to get a clean fold on the glue flaps and then glue the tread strip into a circle. It holds its shape pretty well when gluing the sidewalls up, and if you backcolor the perimeter of the sidewalls with a nice dark gray, it's amazing how clean you can make wheels look with minimal effort. This boosted my comfort level with rounded shapes significantly, and is why I started doing more rounded shapes in the last year or so.

3. The right paper makes a lot of difference. The thinner the paper, the cleaner the build, but the trick is to find a paper that has a good combination of stiffness and thinness. I find 47-50lb photo paper, especially Canon's MP-101 matte photo paper and Red River 50lb matte photo paper, to be almost perfect. 60lb Hammermill Color Copy is great for getting clean builds also, but it needs strategic reinforcement to prevent bowing. 80lb Hammermill Color Copy is a good intermediate, being stiffer than the 60lb and slightly thinner than the typical dingy, coarsely-finished, but wonderfully buildable 110lb Communist toilet paper sold in Wal-Marts and office supply stores. There's also actually no one right thickness to rule them all, so I keep a selection of different thicknesses on hand and frequently use the nasty cheap stuff as backing and reinforcement for the stuff that prints beautifully. My rule of thumb: the smaller it is, the thinner the paper should be.

4. Technique makes a big difference too. I used to be a huge fan of creasing instead of scoring because it got me out of having to do a lot of edging, but once I fell into the habit of scoring my folds with the knife, it made for crisper and cleaner folds, and when I discovered Tombow brush tipped markers, edging stopped being a visual worry for me. However, it also made for "floppy" glue tabs that made it difficult to cleanly close up a volume from time to time, and I fell in love with perforated folds after getting my Craft ROBO. They give a nice combination of springiness/resistance and crispness, and the visual issues largely go away when you edge with closely matching colors. In fact, I've been looking for a pounce wheel small enough and with enough teeth to emulate my Craft ROBO's perfs when I'm doing a hand cut build. At first, I still had a bit of issue aesthetically just knowing that the fold lines were perfed, but I got over it after noticing that I barely see the perfs at all in tablevision thanks to the Tombow edging.

I also have a cheesy Youtube how-to video I did a few years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22zrSOI3WIw

Hope some of that was useful.

Thanks CR for your guidence. I still think it is a nice build anyway.

Being another fat finger builder ( a pair if 45 degree tweezers can make the greatest of difference.)

Solid build.
What Mel said about wheels.

My secret: Patience. That, and I work on two vehicles at the same time, not necessarily the same type of vehicle though. I'll glue a piece in place, or part of a piece, then switch to the other model while it's drying, glue a piece, switch back to the first one, etc.

In particular with that GPV model; I started in the center for a lot of those big plate pieces (hood, back cover, under belly plate) glued them in one direction while leaving part of it open so I can reach inside the model and move bits around while the glue is setting. Then close the end flaps once the glue has set solidly on that first bit.

I also edge first.
Keep going, they get easier.

Had to focus on Fonts this week, which is why I haven't added much to this or the Kitbashes.

Today's very quick build is of some of the tool kits from Ebble's Guncrawl came. These are actually pretty neat and could be repurposed for a TLX "Old Republic/Federation" set without too much work. This little group has already been claimed by my daughter for her ponies... so Twilight Sparkle apparently has an Imperial workbench in her lab.

Thanks, everyone, for the advice on edging. I'll see what I can do with building this weekend. I really need to get to the arcade and finish up a packet of some kind as an official submission. I don't like it feeling half-done at this point...

Those prop sets are some of my favorite models. I snuck quite a few Easter eggs into almost all of these little sets as well as the UD-41's payload set.

Oh, they aren't 200dpi, actually, they're 256dpi. I still do all of my work at that resolution today for many boringly technical and traditional reasons. I'm also not planning to roll the props into a new set, since they're exactly where I want them to be: decorating Guncrawl layouts like they're supposed to.

The only way converting the Guncrawl tiles to TLX format would work seamlessly is if I went from the 2" supergrid with 1" grid squares to a 3" supergrid with 1.5" squares and used only 3x3 tiles and 3x6 corridor tiles, and that would require digging out the source files to amend the rules accordingly, which I have no intention of doing at this time because 1st Edition has been a finished product for nearly 3-4 years now. It's simpler to just leave the tiles alone because they're supposed to be components of a quickie playing field, and they do that job just fine.

If you want to play the game on TLX sets instead, then you can simply build your maps using any existing TLX set and ignore the tiles that come with it. If memory serves, it shouldn't break the rules.