Papercraft with Blender | Hacker News Reader

Papercraft with Blender

matiasmorant.wordpress.com

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I was working on a python script in 2004 for Blender to work similar to Pepakura [1] when I was making stitch and glue kayaks in order to prototype them in paper first. As the author says, I wasted many a weekend making all sorts of paper models. Then I got sidetracked writing a photoclinometry script in Blender to CNC bas reliefs into maple planks in 2005.

Pepakura was/is amazing! Was the current plugin based on it I wonder. Paper work (origami, etc...) are big in SE Asia. I lived over there for 7 years, and saw some amazing things especially in Japan.

  [1]  http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/productinfo/index.html

Thanks, I always forget the word "pepakura"

ps: I'm also looking for pepakura based mechanics. If anyone knows anything, shoot me

What do you mean by Pepakura based mechanics? There are deployable structure ala Hoberman linkages, and there are multitudes of papers on origami and math with examples of folding actuators and bodies. Recently MIT IIRC has been putting plastic origami in plastic bags that can be pumped or evacuated of air to create mechanical actuation. Very exciting times indeed!

Well just the sort of things you mentioned. Except I didn't know about them :)

Glad to have helped!

Deployable structures are very interesting as a general category. I love how an art form like origami can create things of wonder and beauty, and then mathematics comes along to show there's even more to be taken in.

There are even examples of solving geometry problems with origami instead of using compass and ruler.

Do you have blog posts or other info on your kind of kayak design workflow? How did you join the maple boards? Were they just ribs and you put composite over it? There's a completely insane maker on youtube called Jamie Mantzel, he did some composite kayaks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n01cY3jOl0c

I was doing two different things: wooden carvings from photos on solid maple boards, and stitch-and-glue kayak designs and building. I used DelftShip (IIRC it was FreeShip at the time) to design the hulls. I tried a few others, including Rhino and trying to develop one in Blender, but the NURBS were a bit hacky then for what I was intending.

I would eventually use Rhino to develop the 2D panels to cut on my ProgressiveCNC rack-and-pinion router table. Along the edges to be joined, you would drill a very small hole, 0.0625" (~1.6mm) diameter, 6mm from the edge and 100 to 150mm apart. Using bare copper wire, you would fish it through and twist the ends to bring the edges into contact, hence 'stitch-and-glue'. You can look the process up online. The inside and outside would be glassed with epoxy resin from West Marine and fiberglass resulting in a beautiful glossy wood after much finishing and sanding. We would incorporate the carvings into the coaming around the kayak's cockpit. The kayaks were made from 4mm marine-grade Okume. I also made traditional strip and strongback kayaks and a Greenland kayak with bamboo and canvas vs. seal skin. I didn't mean to go on. Seems like a lifetime ago!

The photoclinometry algorithm I utilized for the wood carvings from photos was adapted from NASA/JPL research to be able to get more information from the thousands of black and white singe lens photos taken by the various satellites and spacecraft. I wrote it in python for Blender. Now there are much more sophisticated geometry extraction algorithms with machine learning to guide the resulting mesh 3D creation without the use of laser scanners.

There are a lot of 'inspired' boat builders out there. I formed a wooden boat company called Franklin Boat Works with my partner, and we made all sorts of water craft in the small category. A design I never built was to be a lake ferry for about 8 to 10 people with an electric pancake motor for the shaft and long benches running fore and aft. All steampunked out with brass trimmings and gauges for fun.

The bottom line in all of this is that Blender's python API even in 2005 encouraged breaking out of the 3D program to make all sorts of stuff and push the limits for what could be done with it. I donated $50 (I think that was the amount, maybe $25) to the original drive to buy the Blender code to create the opensource Blender, and now my donation has been returned a 100-fold and I am amazed at what Blender has become! Keep making and coding!

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing :)

Wow. Answers like this are why I come to HN. Thank you.

I would suspect something akin to the Chesapeake Light Craft kits (http://www.clcboats.com/shop/kayak-kits/?jm=1). Panel edges are "stitched" together with wire, glued with epoxy, and then layered in fiberglass and epoxy.

Are there plans to add sane UI idioms to Blender?

3DMax, Maya, 4DStudio, SketchUp, FreeCAD, ...basically all other 3D tools nowadays (since Win95 btw) have common UI with normal menu bar and common shortcuts and mouse-control.

Blender is still stuck in the early 1990s Unix UI chaos. Even Gimp has nowadays better UI than Blender.

Blender might be the best open source 3D modeler, etc. but it has a nightmarish completely non-standard user interface.

Why can't Blender devs add an UI and mouse control similar to 3DMax/Maya/4DStudio/SketchUp/FreeCAD??

This means cosplay is about to get a lot easier for a lot of people. No more taking weeks to prototype things out of difficult materials; now you can model a character, and have a painted cardboard costume ready to go over a long weekend!

I'm not involved with cosplay, but I do believe that this is already a common workflow. I know there's a papercraft plugin for Sketchup that let's you flatten objects, add glue tabs. Folding and gluing takes the majority of the time.

I didn't know that, that's awesome - wish I'd known when I was working on a halloween costume this fall :/

Damnit HN, why must you repeatedly post things that are destined to steal all my free weekends.

This seems pretty awesome; this might be a cheaper alternative to 3d printing for certain scenarios.

Friends of mine used papercrafting as a cheap alternative to plastic sci-fi spaceships for wedding table center pieces.

I loved the low-cost of this crafting hobby and kept doing it almost 5 years later; I love assembling models and having a beautiful spaceships to show off afterward.

Can you share some of the designs you use?

Next step is to wire this up to a Cricut [1] or similar device to never have to worry about finicky cuts!

[1] https://home.cricut.com/

Cricut supports dwg import. I've been itching to try it out, but haven't had a chance yet. Bought mine over Thanksgiving weekend.

Tried this a few weeks ago to create generative papercraft lamps[1]. Really wonderful addon/script and flexible enough to be used with a pen plotter (ie: for printing the fold lines on thicker and larger paper that your regular printer might not support).

[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/mattdesl/status/93493067496803532...

Neat. I wonder if this could be adapted for sewing patterns. The open-source options I've seen out there seem to be lacking (abandoned, or compatibility issues), and the commercial options are very expensive.

Wintercroft has a great collection of plans for these for anyone looking for some premade plans:

https://wintercroft.com

I had the idea a while back for a project that would involve something similar to this, but for sewing patterns to make stuffed animals. It seems like you could do that with this with maybe some minimal modifications.

It's worth checking out Treemaker by Robert Lang. He is an origami master and his is the first of such programs. It's great to see paper-folding algos reach Blender 2.79, but I have immense respect for pioneers in the field.

http://www.langorigami.com/article/treemaker

"TreeMaker" mostly created for paper folding aka origami modeling, and its little different from '3D model -> papercraft'.

"Pepakura Designer" & discussed Blender add-on are different from "TreeMaker".

But for origami there is also cool "OrigamiEditor3D"[0]

[0] https://github.com/ba-sz-at/origamieditor3d

I understand, that's what I meant when I said "the first of such programs" because there has been a good bit of evolution in the scene.

But Treemaker remains notable for being the first of its kind.

In a lot of ways, papercraft is an easier problem to solve than origami. Pepakura Designer is still a cool project and makes me wish I were more into papercraft than origami.

The link you provided could really use some screenshots so I could compare its feature set to others at a glance

Well, this is a serious regression from 3d printing :)

More seriously, this is genius. I can hardly imagine how challenging it must have been to build something that automatizes finding which parts should be glued and act as joints.

This could also have impact for all early age kids schools. Is there any way a teacher could easily generate a model from a few pictures and make it some papercraft for kids? Or if not, are there limitations on which models can be used, or is it possible to use a 3d scan? Just imagine the awe of kids who made a paper model of the school's pet or something. Also a good way to create some interest for DIY in them.

Based on this addon script it looks like? https://github.com/addam/Export-Paper-Model-from-Blender

Any ideas for very large prints? Tried to make a mask 3 years ago that spanned 12 sheets of cardboard (eventually had planned to do it in fiberglass resin). Predictably the seams of the paper made the mask too weak.

Author here. The goat was about 10 sheets of A3 cardboard.

Solved the seam issue with paper tape. The larger the tape area, the better.

To give cardboard more rigidity, you can paint it with vinyl glue

Thank you kindly. I'll give this a shot :)

This is essentially what UV unwrapping is. Seems like a pretty neat auto-UV layout algo... Are people in the Blender community using this plugin for texturing game assets? Does it work well with high poly models?

It is, but Pepakura which I mentioned above works out the folds and cuts. Any development of 3D models with facets or low count polygons with paper can be done granted with lots of time. It gets interesting when you work in something with some thickness and stiffness, and you want curvature and not facets. I was tweaking 'unfolding' or 'developing' panels from Rhino models for my kayaks as mentioned in a reply up in this thread. The kayaks were made of 4mm Okume plywood and needed to have curved surfaces. The payoff was watching the 3D surface take shape as you "stiched and glued the seams of the 2D panels.

This seems similar, but somewhat different than UV auto-layout in terms of the restrictions on the map. For this mapping to produce a buildable object, each flattened face must have the same area as the 3D face, and the mapping from 2D to 3D must be globally bijective. In UV-mapping, given a set of artist-specified cuts, I do not think it is always possible to obtain an area-preserving and globally bijective map. Most industrial-strength UV tools also allow artists to rescale and deform certain faces (to make it easier to paint under fine geometry, for example), which would be wouldn't make sense given the end goal of this algorithm.

The difference is that all faces are proportional.

UV unwrapping is almost always done with fewer edges, so the unwrapped mesh ends up distorted.

Blender has a pretty advanced UV layout algorithm builtin for all your texturing needs. This plugin would probably have problems with n-gons which the UV layout tools handle without too much problem.

I’ve dont something simple but similar to this with UV unwrapping in Blender directly. You can even export the UV map to SVG.

With UV unwrapping you can stretch the pieces, you may even want that to allow for more detail in the texture for specific areas.

looks fantastic! does the Blender functionality have curvature modeling as well? in other words, if I want to do a cylinder, would it have polygons or a large sheet rolled?

Also, I think it would be great to have a solid-filling functionality as well. If a part of model needs extra-support, it would generate a honeycomb-like structure inside the specified solid.

I think curvature modeling would be a great extension to the plugin.

i would love to contribute to the Blender plugin for this feature (curvature modeling). Is there a computational geometry reference that could help me get started?

I think there's a plugin for Rhino that does curvature modeling. Not sure about Blender right now but last I checked some time ago, no.

Back when I was designing my own paper models, I purchased a little sheet metal design book from the '50s. It was just as effective as software and very fun to have around as a reference. Polygonal models can have a polygonal look that can get in the way of a really graceful appearance[1] on some model types.

1. http://i-am-modelist.com/2011/10/10/mig-21/

The result looks awesome, it always feels great to create something software or physical.

the paper folds doesn't match up with the polygons from his screenshot. I wonder if the plugin further simplifies the 3d model when exporting into fold patterns.

Author here. The plugin doesn't simplify the model. They don't match up because they are pictures of different pages.

I'm comparing the same areas of the goat's head between the screenshot and the paper model. They don't match up.

You are author of blog or of add-on?

Blog

Now he can apply paper mache and paint.

Gingerbread. Houses.

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