First, I tried to search for perhaps some other person has already designed a 3D model of it. And hey, there is! Here's a 3D model of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc. for Google Sketchup:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b235ea4e329557dba34bbe0a45adf643
Well, the above 3D model has too many little details here and there that overcomplicate a potentially rather simple papercraft model. So instead, I shall design my own 3D model with simplicity in mind. Well, the 3D geometry is pretty simple indeed. I spent much more time working on the textures on this project, mainly because I haven't really had much experience messing with textures.
Here are two versions of the main building block, both using the same texture file of just the 3 colored rectangles, to be tiled together. The one on the right just has the stripes straight down; that's incorrect, obviously. For the one on the left, I snapped the texture to the polygons first and then squeezed the polygons into the trapezoidal shape. In this case, the texture experiences some sudden "sharp turns" where one polygon connects to another; well, that, too, is unacceptable.
I do not think there is this feature in Metasequoia, but I recall seeing something like twisting a rectangular texture into a trapezoid shape in Google Sketchup. And then I remembered that the texture-manipulating functions in Sketchup are really stupid. While everything else in Sketchup is inference this and that, and you can input exact numbers in not obvious input boxes, the texture adjustments seem to be on a fixed discrete set of preset values. This is the closest I can get the texture to twist into the trapezoidal distortion that I want. Ugh!!
Well, looks like I'll just have to really manually draw the texture and apply it directly to the polygons, instead of using the 3D functions to tile a repeating texture. Go go the old-fashioned way! Yeah!!
In the cartoon, sometimes the "Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc." sign is all in one line, and sometimes in two lines. Well, I don't have a font that looks close enough to pull off the two-liner, so I'll probably just do this.
Apparently, the front door at the bottom floor looks like this. Oh noes, a revolving door!
Well, it's not that hard to put in a fully functional revolving door with moveable parts, I suppose. However, that would kinda ruin the theme of simplicity which had been set forth previously. So instead, I'll just simple up some 2D doors. Yeah!!
Since this one is quite simple as it is, I shall let it be small for the extra cuteness factor. The model's height is just under 10 cm.
Well, here it is. It looks pretty poorly constructed, eh?
I was experimenting with a couple of suboptimal decisions with the construction here and there. First, I was thinking it would be best for this project if I use the the rather thin 20 lbs-ish regular printer paper. However, I wanted more 110 lbs Cardstock experience, and I figured the thickness would allow me to me more rough with pushing disjoint pieces together in a rather ad hoc manner. Well, the lesson here is that 110 lbs Cardstock's thickness offsets the exact lining up of disjoint pieces too much. See the white lines above? I would have pre-markered those places normally, but I decided see how I can do without so super-relying on markers. Well, the result is a rather poorly constructed papercraft model, but I have also gained some valuable insights on how to do better next time, some of which have been applied to the revised ver1.1.
By the way, I am quite satisfied with the small scale of this model, even though the texts are barely readable and whatnot. Here is a close-up to show how small the model turns out.
You may now download the Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated papercraft model in the Download section of this blog.
