Let’s create a city to display our giant mechas with
What the heck is this?
Paperstructure is a Japanese website https://paperstructure.jimdo.com/ selling a huge pile of paper craft kits library contained in PDF files. With your nice home or professional Printer to print the PDFs and then some supply of paper sheets of about 180 to 200 gsm thick and you are now ready to enjoy a familiar hobby of creating paper craft dioramas depicting 1:150 scale (N-Scale) Japanese themed cityscape; buildings, roads and any other structures possible to craft with paper.
Is this free?
No, but they have enough free ones you can try with, in fact I started downloading and building the free ones, but then I thought this isn’t enough for me and the ones on the DVD or Paid downloadable versions are so pretty, very unique, well designed and too many to choose from, and so I bought the downloadable pack version, I would buy a physical DVD copy but I don’t want to wait for the package to arrive. So yes I did not buy the DVD (despite my thumnail preview) but only the equal downloadable pack.
If you want to download some free ones here is the link: click here
The PDF Files
The creators used vector graphics program to design the structures into PDF files. If you haven’t heard about vector graphics, it is just a type of graphic format which is when printed with a good printer will result into a really crisp print outs unlike other image file (raster format) like .jpegs or .pngs which is pixel based so they tend to lose quality when rescaled to be bigger. Vector graphics can handle upscaling pretty well, depending on the printer, laser printers seems to do well on these type of graphic format. Though each design is not vector alone, some textures used are still raster format, so yes there is still some pixel based textures in there. I know a bit of these things since I worked in a printing press before, knowledge obtained to the level I can modify some aspects of these paper craft designs using a vector graphics program, for example I can change the signboards to any thing else to my liking.
I hope I didn’t bore you with those boring graphics design talk above, this is just really interesting to me.
Creating Dioramas
Yes, as you can see by now it is a match made in heaven with our Gunpla hobby. Japanese buildings and mobile suits, think of MS 8TH Team anime scenes.
Of course, like Gunpla, one is expected to exert some work on a paper craft kits using the usual tools like scissors, rulers, glue, hobby knife and of course some time and patience. There are lots of tutorials out there about papercraft. Mind you, this is 1:150 scale so you are going to work almost microscopic and that gives a bit of challenge, if you don’t like this challenge then this might not be for you, you are free to purchase ready made ones on the net, those ready made kits are not cheap but that’s the trade.
So expect me to extend my hobby to adding paper craft dioramas in to the mix, later hauls will include some tools or supplies for diorama purposes.
