Is anyone willing to share a blender image with me....

[cgutzmer]

Hello!
As implied in the title I am looking for a kit that was created in blender to mess about with. One that has already been unfolded to prove out it works. It doesnt need to be anything super fancy but want to get an idea of what I need to learn about here. Dont worry i wont sell it or give it away or anything.
Thanks
Chris

[MOD]

I was under the impression that Blender is best used as the design platform and then imported into Pepakura for unfolding. Most of my research on the topic comes from Youtube. Perhaps I am misinformed.

I too am curious about your question.

[airdave]

I am running Blender 2.9.
One of the issues is finding up to date tutorials...each version of the software has undergone significant changes.
For some reason, they like to keep messing with basic tools and layout, making it confusing when you are looking at older tutorials!

Blender was created by blending a number of different software and 3D modeling steps into one software
...hence the name Blender.

A paper modeler needs only be concerned with the first steps of 3D modeling in Blender, the building of the 3D shapes.
The trick is learning the basic functions and operations in Blender, which is known not to be the most intuitive software for beginners.

Blenders shaping, smoothing, skinning, texturing, lighting, rigging, animation, video editing, etc abilities are really not needed for proper paper model design.
But you could create a 3D model, then apply skins and textures...and then use Pepakura to unfold a low quality version (as a paper model).

There are a number of plug-ins that work with Blender for "unfolding" shapes into flat 2D elements (and avoid Pepakura).

Once shapes are unfolded into flat 2D elements, they can be exported as a vector file and imported into any graphics program and coloured, textured, etc in higher quality.

Adding glue tabs is a fairly simple manual operation (although time consuming) that can also be done in graphics editing.

[MOD]

After pondering this thread for a while, I found a simple Blender Model that we can play with for paper model export. Retro ship | DownloadFree3D.com

FYI: The model is buried deep in the zipped source folder (about 4-5 folders), it is a .DAE file format. The file has a very generic name, which threw me off at first.

[cgutzmer]

Thats cool - thanks guys! I will see if i can find that model. How do you unfold yours dave?

[cgutzmer]

That file does not look like a default blender file type. I will see what I can find