Eight people worked full time for 14 days to hit the deadline
It’s easy enough for an Ideas Man to say “Hey, let’s make a seven-foot-eight Nightmare from Soulcalibur using cardboard and Arby’s boxes. That’ll get people to smash the like button!” But how does one actually go about building such a thing? Very carefully, and with a full crew of artists.
Volpin Props lead artist Harrison Krix explains how it all went down in this making-of video.
The build began in ZBrush with a low-poly model of Nightmare, which was then put into a program called Pepakura and sent to a laser cutter to create the base shapes. “It does half cuts through all the cardboard and we can use that as fold lines,” said Krix. “We end up with sort of these tube shapes with a lot of half cuts through the material, and that makes it really bendy and flexible.”
From there, the artists reinforced the cardboard with a high-strength epoxy and good ol’ hot glue guns. The project’s two-week deadline meant that they worked on every piece of Nightmare simultaneously. The most impressive bit is definitely the detailing on the Soul Edge. Building the iconic weapon required tacking on “literally thousands of tiny pieces of red cardboard” one by one. The effort shows!
Fun fact: Volpin Props designed and built the Mr. Destructoid helmet back in 2012.
