3D Mailbox

3D Mailbox

You can file 3D Mailbox under the software category “sounds more interesting than it is.” This unique e-mail client delivers on most of its promises, transforming individual e-mail messages into 3D avatars that walk, swim, and shuffle around aimlessly. System requirements, e-mail account limitations, and a sluggish implementation of a 3D world prevent it from rating a higher score. It’s certainly not a bad product, but it does seem to be a completely unnecessary one.

3D Mailbox works with nearly any POP e-mail service that allows it to be accessed from an external client. We had no problems setting up and checking our test Gmail account, though we did have to change the port setting and tweak our antivirus client to allow 3D Mailbox to send messages out. 3D Mailbox turns each message into a 3D avatar that is, by default, male or female depending on the assumed gender of the sender. You can also make all of your messages female or male if you prefer. The men wear wetsuits and swim trunks, while the women wear barely there bikinis.

Each message comes in through the front gate and is assessed by a bouncer. All messages go through a disinfecting shower–legitimate e-mails will travel through to the high-dive and pool area, while spam will be directed to the beach.

The spam filter worked relatively well, and it’s simple to mark any new message as spam. Once delineated as spam, each message transforms into an obese sumo-wrestler-style avatar and jiggles out to the spam beach. Deleting a spam message sends it to the ocean to be devoured by a spam shark. No kidding.

While a spam feeding frenzy is good fun, 3D Mailbox suffers from a sense of scale and proportion and requires a very large amount of system resources. You can rotate the camera around by clicking with your left mouse and sliding, but you cannot “pan,” and zooming is limited to two perspectives. Lots of the areas in the default level–Miami Beach–are quite large, and characters can often take a long time to move themselves from your in-box (pool area) to the trash (Trash Alley). If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t have that many e-mails and would like to see each of them personified, give 3D Mailbox a look, but it’s hard to see 3D Mailbox scaling well with any normal-size e-mail account.

While I have been steadily working on models and tutorials for more house designs, I also have several other models I have previously made that I need to finish landscaping. For one of them I wanted a US Mail drop box. While I thought I could cut one out by hand fairly quickly, I realized that it might be an accessory other people would want for their village, particularly if you made Teri Hanson’s Post Office that she designed for Putz House Monthly. You can’t have a Post Office without mail drop boxes out front!

That would have been my only accessory design for now, until Lucy Foxworth of Paper Glitter Glue put out a pattern for a Paper Mailbox for Valentine’s Day. I wanted 3D mailboxes for my houses too! I downloaded the pattern thinking to shrink it to use as a 3D mailbox for my village, but it is way too detailed for that. Though super cute, Lucy designed it as a Valentine’s decoration that you can stuff full of candy and give as a gift, not as an accessory for a holiday village. So I made a very simple 3D mailbox that you can use with the houses in your village.

I include two different kind of posts for the mailbox. You can also place it on top of a wall or a fence. Consider varying the size of the mailboxes in your village. I notice that some of my neighbors have large mailboxes, while others have ones that are quite small.

Though my intention is to cut all of these out of aluminum cans as accessories for the building I have made, I made my models for this blogpost out of cardstock so that the tutorial would be easier to follow.

Download the 3D Mailboxes pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. Don’t forget to unzip it. The pattern is available in multiple formats – as a SVG (scalable vector graphics), DXF (drawing eXchange format) or PDF file. I now include a 1″ square in with all of my SVG files. Scale the pattern so that the square is 1″ to make the mailboxes in the size they were designed. Of course the wonderful thing about SVG files is that you can easily scale them to make your mailboxes whatever size you would like.

As of this blog post, a Cricut Design Space update broke the attached score lines. You will need to go through the pattern in Design Space and change the score lines to Score and then attach them to their object.

Here is a great tutorial from Jennifer Maker’s website on attaching score lines. I have started making all of my score lines red so that you can tell that they are intended to be are score lines.

Decide which type of post you want for your house’s mailbox. Cut out all of your pieces using my pattern.

Features

• My free pattern for the 3D Mailboxes from the A Cottage in the Forest Library – get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
• Medium Weight Cardstock or aluminum cans – your choice!
• Glue – for the Cardstock I like Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue. I put it in a bottle with a thin metal tip. For aluminum cans, I use Aleene’s The Ultimate Glue.
• A Cutting Machine like a Cricut Maker or Cricut Explore  or, if you are going to make the pattern from the PDF, a hand-held craft blade like an X-Acto knife or Cricut TrueControl Knife. I recently bought a new type of hand-held knife called the Excel Knife. It is nice in that it uses the cheaper craft blades, but the blade doesn’t work its way loose like the blade in my X-Acto knife often does.
• Bone folder (optional, but strongly suggested.) A bone folder helps you make sharp folds when you are using cardstock or cardboard. I have found it even helps with aluminum cans. I now use my bone folder to deepen score lines all the time.
• Multi-surface satin finish acrylic paints or Ranger distress inks in the color of your choice (optional, it you use white cardstock.)