Metroid has been one of my favourite series of games since I first played Metroid Prime back in 2002. There actually aren’t a lot of Metroid-themed papercrafts out there so I felt it was time to make one of the infamous creatures out of paper and change that. It’s actually no surprise that there aren’t too many papercrafts of Metroids specifically as there is a pretty obvious challenge: the membrane.
Metroid bodies consist of a clear membrane surrounding a central nucleus-like brain with some claws attached. This is something that is easy to accomplish in a video game but making it out of paper is obviously a whole other thing. The two main ideas I had were to make an arch to give the impression of shape or to use transparency film to make the membrane. After much testing and playing around with it I ended up focusing on the arch method as I felt the transparency tests weren’t satisfactory.
I think the arch method turned out very well though and I am very happy with the result. From head-on, the model resembles the Metroids from the original Metroid game for the NES. In addition, using the arch to create an impression of shape also fit with my “low-poly”, asymmetric style that also aims to give only an impression. So it worked very well for multiple reasons.
I didn’t entirely abandon the transparency method though as I did create an alternate version with a back shell to provide more shape. It also makes the model a little sturdier as well as a bit of a more challenging build too. I’m also going to keep experimenting with the transparency film to see if I can produce a better result so I may revisit this model again in the future.
Well, time to get back to designing more papercraft models. As always thank you for reading!
The Papercraftsman