Perry the Platyplus - Part 01

This is Perry the Platypus, from the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.  He's a platypus.  He doesn't do much, except that adorable teeth grinding thing and stopping the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz from something with some kind of inator.  Yeah!!

 

Since I have not found any publicly available Perry the Platypus papercraft model, I shall make one of my own, using Metasequoia.  I still don't know what a lot of tools in Metasequoia do or how to use them, but I think I know enough basics now to start making something not too detailed.

Here's how I started, tracing that not exactly a good choice of a reference picture, considering it is sort of a side-view and I'm starting by tracing the outlines directly viewing from the x-, y-, or z-axis, and then exploiting symmetry and whatnot.  I ended up discarding those eyes and beak outlines entirely.

Basically, I arbitrarily decided I'll organize the main body part like that, partitioned by those rectangular meshes.  I drew those meshes line by line, flat on the yz-plane, and then added faces and pulled them in the x-direction.  Oh yes, the texture on the tail is from an actual waffle!

Here I have roughly finished the front and hind legs, and perhaps influenced by the designs of others' papercraft models I have physically constructed, that's how I decide how the legs will join the body.  I choose not to merge the legs with the main body, so there will be no glue tabs between them, and that'll be just fine.

Since the cartoon is only 2-dimensional and whatnot, I wasn't sure how I should add the eyes to the 3D shape I have created thus far.  Here I tried this thing, and it seems to look pretty good.

The waffle tail looks awesome, but it's obviously inaccurate, compared to the original cartoon.  Here I have very sloppily made the texture in MS Paint, without using a ruler or anything because MS Paint doesn't have rulers.  That's okay.  I'll be rotating and skewing the texture anyway.

And then some more minor adjustments, and it's done, hooray!  I mean, I still have to unfold and fix a lot of things in Pepakura Designer, but I mean the 3D-designing part is done.  Yeah!!

I love Pepakura Designer and all, but its heuristic for deciding where to cut the pieces by default sure is silly.  Here is how I would decide where the cuts and glue tabs and orientation of pieces should be.  If you look really closely, you might be able to catch a glimpse of my OCD there!

The dimensions:
Height: 9.9cm
Width: 6.4cm
Depth: 24.3 cm  (whoa, that's pretty long!)

You can download the above model, which I have designed, no sooner than I have physically built a model myself.  Until then, no links for you!