Panelized Punk

A friend and I decided to be Daft Punk for Halloween 2009. Not having the time to sculpt and mold helmets or access to a vacuum former, it seemed the best way to execute a complex form like a helmet would be to build a polygonal model in Maya, make a flattened layout of the pieces in Pepakura, and assemble the parts by hand using super glue.

Step 1: Maya Model

Step 2: Pepakura layout

Step 3: Cutting and seaming

I did a poor job of documenting these steps. I had the layouts laser cut at CCA in San Francisco for about $15 each. They could have been cut by hand with an exacto knife, but as you can image that would have been really time consuming. The red lines in the layouts are for valley folds and the blue are for mountain folds. The chip board material used made it easy to bend the scores in either direction without too much trouble. It dawned on me after making these layouts that the visors would be much easier to make and much more realistic if I just traced splines between the points on the polygon model, and cut out curved strips to be seamed together later with transparent model glue.