Hey Tom!
Your best bet is going to be reading the tutorials. (The first few threads that are stickied when you enter the noob forum) I will however try to give you some idea what you are getting yourself into.
As far as supplies, Stage 1 requires only a few things:
-An Exacto Knife
-Scissors
-110lb. Cardstock (Not 65lb. or regular paper)
-Hot Glue Gun
-Hot Glue Sticks
-Alternatively to the hot glue, super glue
-A Metal Ruler (I prefer a 6" one for ease of moving it around)
-A program called Pepakura Designer (you can find this on
This website)
-A Pepakura File (You can find these in the stickies, on various threads, the
Halo Costuming Wiki, or from other people)
-Patience and lots of it!
What you are going to want to do first is install pepakura. You will then get your pep file, and open it in pepakura designer. You should see two things: a model of whatever your making and a bunch of pages with random shapes and stuff. You are going to print those shapes out on cardstock. You'll first want to change the settings to make sure that you are printing a vector (not bitmap) and also printing on Letter not A4 (This is all in the File>>Print Settings).
Print out your shapes and get to work Cutting! It takes a Looooooong time. like 2-5 hours depending on your build. (I would suggest staying away from an HD builds,they take a long time and aren't good starting places for us noobs. I started with an HD one and it came out okay (see blog in my signature), but I've been told I was lucky).
After you get all the shapes cut out (Making sure to ONLY cut the solid lines), you will start scoring. Some people recommend using the blunt side of an exacto, but I prefer the scoring tip I got in an exacto knife set. (You can see it in my blog too). A lot of people will also recommend that you outline the mountain and valley folds in two different color inks first using a ruler so you don't get confused (Mountains you fold like... a mountain and they are the dashed lines. Valleys you fold like... you guessed it, a valley, and they are the dotted-dashed lines).
From that point you start matching up all of your number and gluing. All you do is find two pieces with corresponding numbers line them up, and glue them.
Once you have a pep model, then you get to resin-ing, fiberglassing, and bondo-ing, followed by sanding, more bondo-ing, sanding, priming, and painting.
This is just a basic walkthrough, and there are a LOT more detailed tutorials out there for this, but this is just to give you an idea of what you're getting yourself into. Once you get a pep model, either read up on those tutorials or post back and see what people say. If you need pep files, links to the tuts, or other questions, just let us know!
Just "diving right in" won't get you far. Welcome to the 405th!
