A year in the making

Warlock's Chapeau
http://www.mediafire.com/?ywtizimmyfy
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UJVHM39I

A year ago today (actually down to this very minute, don't worry, I'm not a witch, I'm writing this around noon and will set it to post itself at exactly 4:04 PM), I started this blog after posting PDOs of every Final Fantasy XI Artifact helm on 4chan.org's Papercraft and Origami board. None of them were tested, and all of them were garbage. In my defense, I did plan to test them all, but I saw a thread specifically about this very item, the Chapeau, one thing led to another, and it was all a downhill slide from there.

Here we are after a year's time. The Cardian, the Mandragora, an Airship, an Ark Angel, a companion Crab, some posters, some more Mandragoras, a Moogle, a Monkey, a Blitzball and a Treasure Chest, some stencils, a cursed horse, another Cardian, a revolution, my goddess of Luck, an airship captain, a big stuffed animal, Heidegger (not the philosopher), a Harlequin, three versions of the same guy with mommy issues, another Moogle, a straw man (not the fallacy), a flower girl, a lost girl, some threaded sprites, another Airship, an adventure in video-boredom, a man with a dangerous prosthetic, the beginning of a long-term homage, a few attempts at sharing wisdom, a 48-year-old teenager, some more "wisdom," a hero, his legacy, a handful of faceless enemies, a dumb apple, a can of juice, a cell phone telephone, a tiny sword, a bigger sword, a random box, an Esper girl, a Sky Pirate, and a Frog's namesake later, and I've finally finished the first model I started.

I suppose after all that (it's somewhere between 35 and 40 releases, depending on how liberal your interpretaion), you've earned the right to see who's been babbling at you this whole time.

Too bad a fancy hat can't outweigh all the crazy and ugly. Ohh well~ Is anyone really that surprised?

As for the model: it's not bad. I put off doing anything wearable because the effort involved contradicts my primary directive: be as lazy as God damn possible. The build's easy enough, but the layout obviously suffered from the sheer size of it. I tried doing the testbuild with "overflow paint," something I usually try to avoid, because I firmly believe a well-designed model shouldn't need it. Well the size of this thing kind of tosses "good layout" out the window, so using overflow paint is a wise decision, or at least it was for me. I've included PDOs for both textures (AF and Relic), in case you choose to use overflow as well (I'd normally just do it as a second set of PDFs, but the overflow literally overflows onto other pages and makes a PDF look bad. Works fine, but I'll let you make the judgement call). I've got a pretty big head and it fits me fairly well, so it should work out nicely for any user, assuming you're not a giant or a pixie.


So here we stand. A year of releases. Some good, most not. I've made friends, trained students, and given about as much to the community as I can. It begs the question: what's next?

All I can really say is, the future.


Thanks for reading.