Paper Folding Pit Boxes

Creating a Pit Box from Printed Cardboard

Pre-Blog Back Track #1

As I get up to speed with blogging and continue sorting out this site, I’ll be posting things that happened before now that I think are somewhat related. Mostly things I have done that used some form of art or creativity, other than animation, though that may creep in if I’m not too careful. I use the terms art and creativity loosely. Basically anything that was preceded by me saying, “Honey, I’m going out to the shed and I’m taking the good scissors!”

Project: Pit Box.

First up is a little project I worked on in 2008. A friend of mine collected die-cast cars from the Pixar movie… um… Cars. He collected them “for his kids”. He had set up the toys in his basement as a diorama for them to play with, complete with a whole town and race track. Believe you me, the world of collecting toys like this is crazy huge.

From the Disney/Pixar film Cars.
Photo credit: disney.wikia.com

As the film was about racing cars there were toys for all the racers and their crew chiefs and pit crews. In the movie the crew chiefs sit up on top of a Pit Box. A giant toolbox thing on wheels. This was all new to me too.

A real Pit Box
Photo Credit: allleftturns.com

But Mattel never released this item as a collectible so one crazy fan friend turned to me and asked if I could help. I figured I could make one out of folded cardboard. See how this ties in to my website?! Actually I used really thick, inkjet printer, photo paper.

After studying the object from the movie I made some measurements and designs, and then constructed one in 3D. I then surfaced and textured it like the one in the movie, and set it up in a scene with lights so it would have some shadows and shading.

My 3D model of a Pit Box.

From this scene I rendered out an image of each orthographic projection, front, side top etc, then mapped those images back onto a folded out version of the 3D object. Finally rendering out layers for Photoshop to composite together so that down the track I could change the colours and labels to suit every other racing crew team. Assuming once I make one, those crazy collectors will want the whole set!

And this is what the final, printed artwork looked like.

Pit Box printed onto glossy photo cardstock.

Now it was time for those good scissors I mentioned earlier. Cut, fold, paste, Tab A, Slot B, you get the idea. Fun!

“Start your engines!”

I Did It For The Collectors.

As a final note. Once this was made, I managed about two other variants for different racing teams, and then released the file to the collector’s forum so they could do the rest. Did they go nuts with it? You bet. As more designs were made and shared, eventually the whole set was produced. Go community. Below are some collector’s photos of their own sets.