Quote:
Originally Posted by jleslie48
the only working solution I can use is a combination of the 3d software AC3D (look it up on youtube for tons of examples,) and pepakura designer for unfolding. there are two key elements of AC3D that make it ideal for paper modeling:
1) polygons are true polygons and not just hundreds of triangles. When you unfold a pepakura shape you end up with a minimum number of sides to unfold. this greatly increases your success ratio.
2) the ability to "skin" a model" you take a picture of your object, and it doesn't even have to be straight or square, but you include that picture as a photograph, and you map model sides to the picture and move the vertex's to correct alignment. Imagine printing a tattoo on a stocking and then having the girl pull the stocking over her leg. the stocking stretches and bends to follow the leg. AC3d takes the same approach to applying a photograph to a model.
Pepakura respects pretty well a .3DS file that is the export of a AC3d model (make sure your filenames are less than 8 characters!) and unfolds them quite well. I needed a building recently and there was a cool one here at work that I liked. So I took 4 pictures from all four sides, combined them with some photoediting software (whoops there is a 3rd program I use: paint shop pro.) and used that as my texture file. The entire model I built in about an hour, and it took me about 20 minutes of pepakura work to layout the parts on a single sheet of paper. The model was printed and built an hour later.
Here are some pics (below)
AC3D is about $100, pepakure is less than $50, and I still use paint shop pro from 1999 version 6.0 that I got as freeware back in the day.
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Just checked out their site. AC3d lists for $89. The photo mapping is a great feature as Jon mentions above. They use this mapping for games and such, including my favorite "X-Plane". Looks like all you have to do is have a photo of what you want to map onto the model surface, like a wing of a B17.
Might have to check this out, minimum size as well, download won't take very long.
Mike