Pepakura is the perfect way to build that cosplay armor or weapon you’ve always wanted without breaking the bank

Have you ever seen those incredible cosplay outfits as conventions? Suits of armor from Halo, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, and more? Ever wondered how it was done and how expensive it was? I’ve asked myself those same questions and recently discovered many of those amazing armor sets were done with a system called Pepakura.

What is Pepakura? It is a method of cutting out, folding, and gluing paper together to make armors of shapes and sizes, weapons too. Armor, weapons, even some of the paper toys you see at conventions are made with Pepakura. By taking a 3D image and breaking down its vector points in a special free program you can make your own Pepakura templates, or find already made ones online.

To help you on your way to make your own awesome cosplay armor I’ve created this guide to show you how I created my Halo Mjolnir MK V helmet. This guide will give you many of the quick and dirty details that many Pepakura masters scatter across multiple guides. It will guide through everything you need to get started and the basics of how to go from the designer to a finished fiberglass masterpiece. Starting with the program you’ll need and the best place to find files that will become your cosplay.

Programs and Files:

Pepakura Designer 3 – A free program you can find here, Pepakura Designer 3 is the basis your cosplay project. Using the program you can adjust the size and even the shape of the Pepakura files you find to create the perfect fit for you. It also gives you the power to design your own armor and weapon sets

Pepakura files – These are the 3D model files that you will put into the designer that ultimately become your cosplay. They allow you to look at individual sections of an armor or weapon to show you where they will be folded. You can find a massive collection of files here, it includes everything from Halo to Star Wars.

Materials:

Pepakura guides across the web will give you different ideas on materials you can use when building your cosplay but here are the basic things you’ll need.
110 Pound Card Stock – Make sure this is white or cream. The lines that you need to follow will be a gray color so they need high contrast. You can find this at most craft or office supply stores but be sure your printer is able to handle it. I will cover the best printer for Pepakura building later in the guide.
Glue gun sticks – You can get these pretty cheap and chop them up to put into your glue-pot from any craft or hobby store. They are easier to work with than glue chips and last longer when melted down.
Tooth Picks- You will need these to spread the glue on your folds. Other guides will suggest using small paint brushes but those become useless after the glue dries and have to be cleaned constantly. Toothpicks are also better for reaching the tinier folds.

Equipment:

Glue Pot – Easier and safer to use then a glue gun, you will want to make sure you grab a low temp glue-pot. Unless you don’t mind being burned constantly, then you can get whichever one you like. You can find these at any local hobby or craft shop.
Cutting Mat – Cutting mats are great for Pepakura projects because they keep the surface of your tables safe from the knifes you’ll be using. They are a low-cost way to keep your work area safe and stops it from looking like an Emo practicing ground.
X – Acto Knives – After printing out your cosplay you’ll realize it’s filled with hundreds of precision cuts that scissors simply can’t handle, no matter how fancy they are. Pepakura projects call for a set of X-Acto Knifes that come with several different sized blades for those microscopic cuts.
Gloves – Hot glue, fiberglass resin, bondo body filler when doing Pepakura your working with some nasty stuff so latex gloves are a must. They will help protect both you and your project from disaster.
Patience – This is a long process, you won’t be done overnight and it will be hard.

Paper, Printer, Knifes FTW

In order to have your armor fit well you will need to have measurements of yourself. You can go here to see the 405th tutorial for proper measurements for Halo gear. This is the measurement system I used and it is working very well for us so far. It will also work for any armor set but make sure you follow it closely or risk building a piece that won’t fit. Once you have your measurements we get to move on to the next step. Printing!

Now if your printer can’t handle the 110 lbs. card stock then I suggest you pick up either an Epson printer or a Canon. Canon is a little more expensive but the ink is cheaper where as Epson’s are cheaper with more expensive ink. Check for sales, these are your friend! After checking if your printer will work take the measurements you came up with and put them into your Pepakura Designer.

After printing everything you will need to bust out your knives, ruler, and cutting mat. Use your X-Acto‘s to cut out each piece, this is a long process but it’s worth it. Cut only on the solid lines, the dotted and the dot-dash lines are for the folding stage. Once you have everything cut out you are ready to move on to the more time-consuming process, folding, so be ready for that.

You will need a thin metal ruler, two different colors of pen, and patience, lots of patience. Pick a color for each line type. I used black for the dotted lines (also known as mountain lines) and blue for dash-dot-dash lines (otherwise known as valley folds). You want to use your ruler and mark each line using its colored pen, making it easier to know which way to fold. When your ready to fold keep in mind that Mountain lines. Once the lines are marked you will want to go through and fold each one, this is easiest to make a crisp fold by doing it over the metal ruler.

Once all of your pieces are folded you can move onto gluing. This is a lot like a puzzle because the folded pieces alone do not look like a helmet or much of anything really. Pull up your Pepakura Designer and choose a piece to start with, I started by building the visor and face first and it worked out perfectly for me. Just choose a starting piece and keep getting more pieces out that connect to it by clicking the connecting pieces in the program then finding them in your folded pile. You’ll see numbers along the folds, their will be two of each, you will be connecting those two numbers together and gluing them along the fold.

As for the gluing you will need your glue-pot, glue sticks, and toothpicks. Use the toothpicks to put the glue on the fold and press it to it’s corresponding number. Use a low temperature glue and pot otherwise you will burn yourself and it will be a mess. This way you can be much more accurate and nimble.

Resin, Fiberglass, and Primer oh my!

Now for the fun and dangerous part of the Pepakura process! I will list out the materials you need for the next few steps here:

Materials:

Respirator

Fiberglass Resin

Fiberglass cloth

Acetone

Cheap paint brushes

Black primer paint

Gloves

Safety glasses

Take your finished and dried glued helmet from part two and find a nicely ventilated area; an open garage or outside works best. Place it on a surface that you won’t be upset if it gets damaged while your working. Then put on your safety glasses gloves and maybe some clothing you’re not too fond of. Once your ready take between 1 and 3 ounces of resin, add hardener per container instructions, a paint brush, and a way to stir the resin. Once your resin is mixed up you will have 10 – 12 minutes at best to get the most out of the resin before it is too hard to work with.

With a brush paint a thin layer onto your piece until it’s covered. You will do this 3 times total, letting the resin dry for 2 hours in between. Once the outside is suitably dry and is no longer tacky to the touch you can move on to the next step. As soon as your resin is becoming too chunky to work with throw your brush into a cup of acetone, otherwise it will be toast. Don’t use expensive brushes for this!

The next step is the inside of the helmet. You have to put down fiberglass cloth on the inside of the helmet. By cutting your cloth into 3 inch wide strips it will be easier to place them the helmet. The trick to this is to put down a layer of resin onto the place where you will put that piece of cloth then use your brush to blot resin onto the cloth until it is all lying down and covered. This may take you a couple of tries before you get all the pieces down but that’s alright, it’s a slow process. Let the helmet dry overnight.

After the helmet has dried you can move on to the priming stage. This is very important. Put the helmet on its back and grab your safety gear once again. Prime the entire inside of the helmet with just one coat of primer. Let this sit and dry for about 4 hours. You can also get the bottom of the helmet in this stage. Once the inside and bottom coat have dried flip your helmet over. Now you can do the top; give the top of the helmet a nice coating and yes let it sit once again until it is dry.

Next up we will be going over sanding, priming again, and then the painting of your piece. It may seem a tad convoluted but each step is important to the integrity and strength of your piece. Nothing is worse than a flimsy paper craft armor set that breaks when you wear it!

Sanding, Prime, Paint, and that’s a Wrap!

Congratulations your officially through the roughest parts of the process! Your piece has been folded, glued, fiberglassed, and primed. It probably doesn’t look like much right now, in fact it probably has a lot of rough edges that your wishing were gone. Those rough spots are exactly what the next step will fix.

For this you will need something that is able to sand down those rough edges. You can use med-fine grit sand paper, a power sander, sanding sponges, or a dremel. No matter what you use go across the piece your working on sanding down the rough edges left by the fiberglass process. Keep going until you have nice clean edges, no lumps, and nothing sharp sticking out.

After that’s done you’ll be left with a lot of spots where the primer was sanded off and the bare helmet exposed again. That is when we will be finally using the bondo body filler that we mentioned earlier to create sharp lines and smooth edges. You will be spreading the bondo to all the little nooks and crannies of the piece that were sanded down or spots that you want more definition in. The body filler is the perfect way to make those fine lines pop.

Fill in the areas with bondo that you want to improve on, quickly before it hardens making sure to smooth it all down before then to avoid a lot of unwanted lumps. After that let it sit for several hours so it can harden. Then go back at it with your sandpaper one last time to eliminate any little problem areas the bondo might have made. Once that’s finished you can simply attack your piece with the black auto primer paint again to get it ready for its final paint job.

After letting the primer dry your all set to decide on the colors you want for your piece and how your going to do it, although spray paint is your best bet. Any other finishing touches will depend on the armor piece your making, like adding any lights or breathers. For in-depth tutorials like that you can find all of your answers at the 405th.com. Otherwise good luck and I hope to see your cosplay at a con soon!