Unfolder for Mac – a 3D modelcreating papercraft | Hacker News Reader

Unfolder for Mac – a 3D modelcreating papercraft

unfolder.app

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Beautiful website and interesting app (blender plugin live view is great).

dxf2papercraft [1] Papercraft [2] and Blender paper model addon [3] are free alternatives.

1 - https://dxf2papercraft.sourceforge.net/

2 - https://github.com/osresearch/papercraft

3 - https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/import_expo...

They seem to be much less interactive, right?

Thanks to you and OP for sharing these. I have been wondering if such a thing existed recently. One thing I hope to use it for is to design a polygonal DIY piñata.

What I'd really like, though, is for something like unfolder, that supports tab-and-slot designs, ideally with a custom tab shape.

The Blender live view is really impressive indeed: https://www.unfolder.app/img/unfolder_sync.mp4

There is the commercial Pepakura Designer[1] for Windows since the 90's (I think). The mother/father of all desktop papercraft unfolding apps.

Then there is a new free one, Papercraft[2], written in Rust, that will probably build on all major paltforms. Do not confuse with the STL-based papercraft (lower case p) someone else mentioned[3].

[1] https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

[2] https://github.com/rodrigorc/papercraft

[3] https://github.com/osresearch/papercraft

> Click an edge to move the flap on another side to this side.

That this feature could have been called "Flip flap", but somehow isn't, will forever astound me.

Looks like an incredibly polished implementation of something that's pretty niche. Kudos to the developers.

I love non-flat apps. The art in this app assets are one of the things that I like the most in good old style mac apps.

Remember 90s Windows? You could set any colors to any UI elements you liked. Dark mode was a few clicks away. Or pink mode, if that was your thing. I wish macOS would put the user in control, it would be so refreshing to have a modern UI that's both customisable and consistent.

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

Was it a proper dark mode? I seem to remember that there were some unwanted theme appearance exceptions in Windows back then.

Very easy to hit the first case in Windows Explorer (sidebar is rendered using HTML), you will find many more as you keep looking. Still, the capability to customise the color theme completely disappeared from mainstream desktop OS's, and even today's dark mode is still full of corner cases (usually at the platform boundaries: the web, Electron, foreign toolkits, etc).

Explorer's HTML was also open to customization

To make an intricate costume based off of a fictional character's suit of armor, I found a papercraft model of the character, scaled it to life-size, then printed out the model in pieces at 1:1 scale at an office supply store using their large format printer.

Bringing the huge sheets back home, I cut the shapes needed out of cosplay foam using the printed out segments as a template, then assembled the armor like it was a giant papercraft model.

Worked great :) but to save time next time I need to account for foam having a greater thickness than paper. And maybe paint the foam before cutting it out.

I don't have a use for this myself, but what a great website.

Man I was looking for something like this but Mac only means I have no realistic* way to run it, is it finally time for a "Wine but for Mac apps"?

* at least afaik my hardware is not hackintosh compatible

quickemu on Linux can spin up a macOS VM. https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

    $ quickget macos monterey

Then:

    $ quickemu --vm ./macos-monterey.conf

You have to go through the usual install process for macOS, and can then install your applications. Whether this is legal or ethical is a subject for your own research.

My daughter wanted her birthday to be Sonic-themed, so I've made a little platform and loop from the first stage, modeling it in Sketchup and export to Unfolder, it worked pretty well (but to add textures I've used Affinity Designer after exporting from Unfolder).

Does anyone know what the name of the algorithm would be for unfolding arbitrary polyhedra? I've wanted to implement this for my own library ( https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra-core ) and I could never find the right thing to search for.

I'm assuming it reduces to a problem in graph traversal with some additional spatial constraints but I wanted to find some references before I tried to do my own dumb brute force solution.

> Does anyone know what the name of the algorithm would be for unfolding arbitrary polyhedra?

AFAIK Shepard’s conjecture “every convex polyhedron has an unfolding without overlap” is still open, so I’m not sure that exists.

Links you may or may not have seen:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_(polyhedron)

- https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Unfolding.html

- http://web.york.cuny.edu/~malk/unfolding.html

Yeah. I'm under no illusions that there's always a single connected solution to be easily found. I suppose I'm wondering if there's a good strategy other than just breadth-first trial and error.

Thanks for the links. I'll check them out.

I found a book on folding algorithms a while back. It's called "Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra" by Demaine and O'Rourke. I haven't gone through it myself yet, but I feel like they should have an answer for you.

(They also have a really nice course on MIT's Open Courseware that covers their book: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-849-geometric-folding-algorith....)

You may want to look at [1] as a start.

[1] https://michaelwalczyk.com/project-unfolding.html

I'm going to take a big, wild guess on a subject I know nothing about and bet that it's probably a giant ball of heuristics guiding a search (probably DFS with iterative deepening) over the space of unfoldings, or something dumb, but effective, like that. After all, the point here is to turn a 3d model into a papercraft model. That's not a formal problem, like tying your shoelaces so they don't get easily untied is not a knot theory problem, as such, or putting all your stuff in your bag is not the knapsack problem.

Anyway strong heuristics are the bread and butter of Computer Science, or in any case we have far more heuristics than we have principled algorithms. So I think I have a good chance to win my bet :P

Not sure about arbitrary polyhedra, but you may be interested in this: https://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/myriahedral/

Nice, I am still looking for something that does this but in reverse. Closest I've seen so far is Adobe Fantastic Fold (https://labs.adobe.com/projects/fantastic-fold/) but it's been in beta forever and it's not clear how/if it will become a product.

It's kludgy, but you can approximate this with Fusion360's sheet metal tools. If your flat-pack is well structured, you can just throw it at Origami Simulator and export an OBJ or STL: https://origamisimulator.org/

Unsurprisingly, Amanda Ghassei is behind both Fantastic Fold and Origami Simulator: https://amandaghassaei.com/

Incredibly frustrating that it does not have pictures of the end results (as in folded and everything)

too bad its mac-only

Does anyone know a cheap printer that can do papercuts and stamp the folding lines?

I’m not sure if it’s what you mean but the Cricut Joy in the US will cut these out. It’s $150. The larger version is $300.

Cool, but can it also stamp out (e.g. emboss) the folding lines so the paper will naturally fold at the given lines?

PS: Nice machine but a sibling poster mentions that Cricut is applying vendor lock-in strategies, which is very bad.

It can. You can put a separate head in the printer and it can score the fold lines.

I think you would have to make multiple files of whatever you want to score. I find that it's more trouble than it's worth to have it score.

Depending on what you're making, it can be "good enough" to simply perforate the fold lines. That way you don't have to worry about registration when you flip the piece over

I think you can have different layers be cut or score and you can assign those layers to different SVG groups - which should mean you can have everything in one file and it'll do it in one (assuming you have both tools in at the same time.)

There's two main brands of desktop cutting machines, Cricut [0] and Silhouette [1]. Prices range from around $150 to $400, which depends mostly on piece size, materials support and tool support (e.g. pens/markets, scoring tools, embossing, etc).

They aren't printers, but they all support "Print & Cut" features where you print out your design on a standard printer and then the cutter automatically aligns itself using registrations marks added by their own software.

Note that Cricut tried to push a cloud subscription model a while back but backed off after customers got upset [2].

0: https://cricut.com/en-us/cutting-machines/cricut-explore/cri...

1: https://www.silhouetteamerica.com/featured-product/cameo

2: https://www.ifixit.com/News/49494/cricut-messed-with-crafter...

Is there a platform that one can view/upload assets to import into this?

Is there equivalent for metal ?

oh, it's for mac only

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