Maratus head model

Making the 3d model for the Maratus head.

Published 12 June 2019

If you’ve read my process documentation, the general process used for this skull will be familiar to you. I’m skipping the nitty-gritty details as I write this in CE2019 because the details of my process have changed since when I made this skull in CE 2014.

This model was done freehand in Blender, without the benefit of a base model.

A screenshot of Blender, showing a shaded stylized spider head from an angle somewhere off the left front eyes. — Do you see this nonagon and this septagon? How regular they are! This was made possible with the LoopTools addon to Blender.

And do you see how only one half of the head has polygons? How the other half is mere illusion? That’s because I have a “Mirror” modifier set in the object’s Modifiers pane, but *I haven’t applied the modifier yet*.

A screenshot of Blender, showing the Add Modifier pane with a Mirror modifier created but not applied. — Do you see this nonagon and this septagon? How regular they are! This was made possible with the LoopTools addon to Blender.

And do you see how only one half of the head has polygons? How the other half is mere illusion? That’s because I have a “Mirror” modifier set in the object’s Modifiers pane, but *I haven’t applied the modifier yet*.

Other things to do: Make sure that your grid unit is in inches or millimeters, not generic units, and that the models are scaled before you start modeling. I had to take two hours to get things scaled properly when I realized I was outputting a PDF that was a hundred-odd feet by five-hundred-odd feet instead of three feet by fifteen feet.

A view from Blender of the paper model, shaded in numerous different colors to highlight its facets.

Fedex Kinko’s HP printers don’t like the PDFs output by Blender, but their staff desktop computers will accept the PDFs with a minimum of overrideable error messages.

A smashed-flat lineart model of the polygons used to make the head. — Though this is but a flattened view of the papercraft model of the head of the spider, the mandibles are prominently featured j/k those bits are the loops on the bottom of the skull.