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  #1  
Old 08-02-2016, 04:32 PM
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Kugelfang Kugelfang is offline
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It's been 6.5 years since I've been here... What's the state of the art?

Literally:

Welcome, Kugelfang.

428729 Unread Posts since your last visit.
You last visited: 01-22-2010 at 11:25 AM

So, I'm a bit out of touch. What's the state of the art in unfolding digital 3d models? Is it still Pepakura? I'd like to model in Wings3d, unfold and export to SVG for adding the graphic touches. Wings3d development appears to be mostly dormant at this point. I assume Wings' UV mapping is not accurate enough to use for paper modeling purposes--though it's much better than when I was a heavy Wings user.

I briefly glance at the topic regarding PDO tools which appears to get me where I want to go but is it possible to shortcut the Pepakura step?

I'm almost exclusively a Linux user these days. If I can avoid a virtual box or WINE detour I'd be happy. If it was an open source solution I'd be even happier.

TIA

--jeff
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  #2  
Old 08-03-2016, 01:19 AM
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I used Blender as the unfolder for models from Wings3D. The versions below 2.49 had the unfold script included already, for newer versions there is this extension: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/E...rt/Paper_Model There may be more, I haven't searched for any other for a long time.

Btw. it seems that devs still work on Wings3D, last release is from June 21, so I wouldn't worry.
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Old 08-03-2016, 07:59 PM
ssmeier ssmeier is offline
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Modeling done in Wings3D of a Simple Boat tutorial originally for Metasequoia

I have followed a Simple Boat tutorial originally done for Metasequoia, using Wings3D.

I saved the Simple Boat Wings3D model as a *.obj file and unfolded it in Pepakura Designer. I took the output of Pepakura Designer into Inkscape.

I uploaded the *.wings model files, the *.obj model files, the *.pdf files and the *.svg Inkscape file to my OneDrive and shared them.

Here is the OneDrive link to the folder containing Word documents of the tutorial and some of my experiments:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AtqY81B6SadMg1YMgb9Ufjza8HFY

Here is a OneDrive link to the folder of all the model and output files:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AtqY81B6SadMg1ea7dMx7DQkuzB3

I have attached a screenshot of Wings3D with the boat model loaded, a screenshot of the PDF from Pepakura, and a screenshot of the PDF from Inkscape where I colored the windows with a gradient.

Here is the link to the Papermodelers thread I posted the Metasequoia tutorial OneDrive documents in:
Tutorials for metasequoia

- - - - -

A note about the OneDrive Word documents.
If you are running a Word version that has the "Ribbon" interface, here is a tip to see how the document and tutorial is organized.

Click the View tab, and then click Outline. The Outlining tab is now active in the "Ribbon". Change the Show Level: [1] drop-down from "All Levels" to "Level 4" [2]. Now only the red, green and blue headings are displayed.

To jump to a specific section of the document, click on the heading you want [3], then on the Ribbon, Outlining tab, click the "Close Outline View" [4] .

- - - - -

Screen shots with red arrows and text were created using the free program Greenshot. Greenshot - a free and open source screenshot tool for productivity

-Steve
Attached Thumbnails
It's been 6.5 years since I've been here... What's the state of the art?-wings3d-wboat_05.wings.jpg   It's been 6.5 years since I've been here... What's the state of the art?-pdf-unfolded-wboat_05-.jpg   It's been 6.5 years since I've been here... What's the state of the art?-pdf-inkscape-wboat_05-windows.jpg   It's been 6.5 years since I've been here... What's the state of the art?-modelling-tutorial-simple-boat-word-outlining-tab.jpg  
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Old 08-03-2016, 11:44 PM
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imcold imcold is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ssmeier View Post
a screenshot of the PDF from Pepakura, and a screenshot of the PDF from Inkscape
Did you try exporting the pdo to svg directly with pdotools? I usually get far more useful vectors with it.
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Old 08-04-2016, 08:42 AM
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Kugelfang Kugelfang is offline
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Thanks, imcold and ssmeier.

It appears that things really haven't changed much in the past 6 years. I did install the latest Wings3d and the UV mapping has improved quite a bit since last I used it. Looks like it might actually be usable in unwrapping a model into a paper form. You can export the 'texture' of an unwrapped object (in order to create a skin for the model) but the exports are all in raster formats so they would then have to be converted to svg for my purposes.

So I looked at both GIMP and Inkscape and you can create paths from the raster images and then save the paths as svg. But it sounds like creating the paths will take a lot of hand work since neither program is terribly accurate in autotracing.

Then it occurred to me that since I'd be creating UV coordinates in the 3d model by unwrapping it, why couldn't those UV coordinates be pulled out of the model and directly converted into svg? I've written scripts in Ruby that convert *.obj models to *.ac format. And I've written Perl scripts that turn geographic data into svg maps. I should be able to write a script to parse out the UV coordinates and output them into svg, right?

I suspect the Blender script does something similar but since I already know Wings fairly well I'd rather bypass another learning curve. Has anyone else headed down this path?

Hmmm... I think I may have a new project worth investigating.

--jeff
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Old 08-04-2016, 11:23 AM
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imcold imcold is offline
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The issue is that when you do casual everyday unwrapping (on objects that are not trivial), the uv map's areas can and often get stretched. So you'd have to be careful about that when unwrapping. With unfolding you don't have to care about that, because unfold equals unwrap with preserved relative dimensions.

Btw. if I remember correctly, you can already export the unwrapped mesh as svg vectors in Blender.
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Old 08-04-2016, 01:08 PM
Richschindler Richschindler is offline
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No, no, no, we don't use any of that software anymore. Nope!
In 6.5 years many improvements have come along.

We simply think of an object we want, and low and behold, it comes shooting out of our 3D printer.

Now, isn't that so much better than all that cutting and gluing.

Just kidding !!!
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  #8  
Old 08-10-2016, 10:48 AM
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Kugelfang Kugelfang is offline
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It comes shooting out of our what? Oh... 3d printer. Thank goodness ;-)

I have to admit that for all the years I've downloaded, installed and tinkered with the various versions of Blender, I hate it! If I'm going to put that much effort into learning to use something, I think my time would be better off learning to program in Erlang and create an unfold plugin for Wings3d.

Speaking of Wings... yeah, it seems like the UV unwrap is still too prone to distorting the shapes of the model's polygons to be of much use in designing paper models. So it would be rather pointless to convert the UV map to *.svg. And as I put more thought into writing a script to unfold a *.obj model, I don't believe the *.obj format has any way of identifying a 'seam' (as used in the Blender paper model unwrap plugin). Groups or materials could be used to identify separate developments, but I can't think of any way of indicating where a cut should be generated within the development to allow it to lay flat. Just thinking out loud here....

Years ago I had found a Java applet that did a fairly decent job of unfolding *.obj files. I haven't been able to relocate that, though. Anybody familiar with this unfolding software: Mesh Unfolder v3 ?

At this point it looks like my options are being narrowed to using 1) Blender or 2) Pepakura running in Wine (or maybe the above unfolder but I don't see any real advantage over Pepakura with that) or 3) writing a Wings plugin.

--jeff
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