Hello friends and fans,
you might have been wondering what I was doing in the last few weeks. I'll tell you.
A colleague of mine left us and I did not want to let her go without a small farewell present. I did not want to make another Canon cat for her (too many of them may become redundant
) but something "fresh". I found out that she liked dogs, Dalmatians in particular. Google brought me to this cutie:
www.papercraftplaza.com
It is a Pepakura model. I know that some of you despise the program. However, I have absolutely nothing to say against the program. It works as it should and without it I would not have been able to give you the Colonial Raptor, Colonial One, the stand for the Tiangle ship, Dr Zee's ship and many more.
If you encounter any problems with Pepakura models it is surely not the fault of the program BUT the fault of the creator of the model. And this Dalamatian puppy is one of these cases.
Even though I have given you the link to the model above I strongly recommend NOT BUILDING IT NOW. Wait for my rework. Trust me. If you try your hands at the model as it is at the moment, it won't make you happy.
There are several things wrong here: It has intersections, alternating flaps, a blurry texture and it was unfolded in a way that you break your fingers. To make things worse: The model is password protected, so you can only open it in Pepakura Viewer which gives you absolute ZERO options to fix any of the mistakes easily. All in all, this is a model to scare anyone off.
It's a model which drives me mad. It's models like this which make Pepakura look bad and which actually might hurt the community because with some LITTLE effort the designer could have delivered a perfect pattern. The texture is a different matter (it could be solved with Gimp), but releasing a model with intersections and this kind of unfold is a no-go. This is a prime example why you should never release a model without a proper test build before. NEVER EVER.
Knowing this, you might ask why I chose to build this model despite those issues. Well, it is CUTE. One of the cutest models I have ever seen, and this is the reason why I wanted to see if I could improve it. And boy, there was one tool which alone brought it from "so-so" to "superstar" - in one click! And I did not even asked for that!!!
Well then, enough talk. Let's begin!
The model is 21cm long and has three parts pages. Since I wanted to apply some changes to the texture I printed a lined and a no-lined version to PDF. Then I turned the pages into PNGs using PDFill. I used a resolution of 100dpi because the texture was not hi-res in the first place and this helped keeping the file size down. My goal was to see if it was possible to enhance the texture in some way.
My first thought was: tracing it in Corel. This would have been possible, but this would have required some work. Since I did not know if the pattern would look good in the end I did not want to spend too much time on it. I took a look at the head:
You can clearly see the bad quality of the graphics. Improving them was crucial for the project. If this could not be done, it would have been shelved and I would have jumped back onto the cat again.
Then something unexpected happened. A few weeks ago Nano Banana 3 was released. I already saw some improvements in the renderings compared to v2.5 and I thought, maybe it was able to at least make the image sharper. So I uploaded the snippet above into Gemini and asked it to improve the texture. This was the result:
Well.
It did something but the result was not what I wanted. It sharpened the blurry texture, but instead of creating a new image with a sharp texture it created a new image with "sharp blurs". I know it's nitpicky but it's exactly what happened. Hm.
I took a look at the conversation again and it dawned to me that I may have worded my query in a wrong way and asked for the wrong thing. So I started anew and tried another prompt. I explained to it what my goal was and that I had a paper model template with a blurry texture which should be enhanced and sharpened. The result would mean the rise and fall of the project.
After a minute or so it gave me THIS:
And this, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely knocked off my socks!
Please take a close look at what happened: I asked it for a sharpened texture. It went above and beyond and made everything crisp and clear, and added a realistic fur texture on top! Something I had not asked for but something Gemini added on its own after I gave it the information that it was a pattern of a dog. And just look at that nose!!! ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!
I went ahead and fed all three parts pages to Gemini and repeated the procedure. The results were stunning.
It had a small hiccup on the feet and spread the padding and nails across the whole foot instead on the bottom of it only but that could be solved in Gimp.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The colour was tweaked in Gimp and lightened up. A few parts had a very rough fur texture which stood out a bit. I uploaded the image to Gemini again, marked the parts in question and asked it to adapt the texture so that it blends in with the other parts.
Before:
After:
I was lucky camper!
Please note that this edit took place after the first test build, so the following images show still the long fur texture.
This is a prime example of how AI can be used as a tool.
The pages were printed and assembly could begin.
you might have been wondering what I was doing in the last few weeks. I'll tell you.
A colleague of mine left us and I did not want to let her go without a small farewell present. I did not want to make another Canon cat for her (too many of them may become redundant
) but something "fresh". I found out that she liked dogs, Dalmatians in particular. Google brought me to this cutie:Dalmatian - papercraftplaza
www.papercraftplaza.com
It is a Pepakura model. I know that some of you despise the program. However, I have absolutely nothing to say against the program. It works as it should and without it I would not have been able to give you the Colonial Raptor, Colonial One, the stand for the Tiangle ship, Dr Zee's ship and many more.
If you encounter any problems with Pepakura models it is surely not the fault of the program BUT the fault of the creator of the model. And this Dalamatian puppy is one of these cases.
Even though I have given you the link to the model above I strongly recommend NOT BUILDING IT NOW. Wait for my rework. Trust me. If you try your hands at the model as it is at the moment, it won't make you happy.
There are several things wrong here: It has intersections, alternating flaps, a blurry texture and it was unfolded in a way that you break your fingers. To make things worse: The model is password protected, so you can only open it in Pepakura Viewer which gives you absolute ZERO options to fix any of the mistakes easily. All in all, this is a model to scare anyone off.
It's a model which drives me mad. It's models like this which make Pepakura look bad and which actually might hurt the community because with some LITTLE effort the designer could have delivered a perfect pattern. The texture is a different matter (it could be solved with Gimp), but releasing a model with intersections and this kind of unfold is a no-go. This is a prime example why you should never release a model without a proper test build before. NEVER EVER.
Knowing this, you might ask why I chose to build this model despite those issues. Well, it is CUTE. One of the cutest models I have ever seen, and this is the reason why I wanted to see if I could improve it. And boy, there was one tool which alone brought it from "so-so" to "superstar" - in one click! And I did not even asked for that!!!
Well then, enough talk. Let's begin!
The model is 21cm long and has three parts pages. Since I wanted to apply some changes to the texture I printed a lined and a no-lined version to PDF. Then I turned the pages into PNGs using PDFill. I used a resolution of 100dpi because the texture was not hi-res in the first place and this helped keeping the file size down. My goal was to see if it was possible to enhance the texture in some way.
My first thought was: tracing it in Corel. This would have been possible, but this would have required some work. Since I did not know if the pattern would look good in the end I did not want to spend too much time on it. I took a look at the head:
You can clearly see the bad quality of the graphics. Improving them was crucial for the project. If this could not be done, it would have been shelved and I would have jumped back onto the cat again.
Then something unexpected happened. A few weeks ago Nano Banana 3 was released. I already saw some improvements in the renderings compared to v2.5 and I thought, maybe it was able to at least make the image sharper. So I uploaded the snippet above into Gemini and asked it to improve the texture. This was the result:
Well.
It did something but the result was not what I wanted. It sharpened the blurry texture, but instead of creating a new image with a sharp texture it created a new image with "sharp blurs". I know it's nitpicky but it's exactly what happened. Hm.
I took a look at the conversation again and it dawned to me that I may have worded my query in a wrong way and asked for the wrong thing. So I started anew and tried another prompt. I explained to it what my goal was and that I had a paper model template with a blurry texture which should be enhanced and sharpened. The result would mean the rise and fall of the project.
After a minute or so it gave me THIS:
And this, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely knocked off my socks!
Please take a close look at what happened: I asked it for a sharpened texture. It went above and beyond and made everything crisp and clear, and added a realistic fur texture on top! Something I had not asked for but something Gemini added on its own after I gave it the information that it was a pattern of a dog. And just look at that nose!!! ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!
I went ahead and fed all three parts pages to Gemini and repeated the procedure. The results were stunning.
It had a small hiccup on the feet and spread the padding and nails across the whole foot instead on the bottom of it only but that could be solved in Gimp.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The colour was tweaked in Gimp and lightened up. A few parts had a very rough fur texture which stood out a bit. I uploaded the image to Gemini again, marked the parts in question and asked it to adapt the texture so that it blends in with the other parts.
Before:
After:
I was lucky camper!
Please note that this edit took place after the first test build, so the following images show still the long fur texture.
This is a prime example of how AI can be used as a tool.
The pages were printed and assembly could begin.
