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Fundamentals Of Paper Model Design

With Blender 3D & An Illustration Program
By Angel David Guzmn PixelOz 1.1 Edition

Publishing

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This book is a free gift to the public courtesy of:

Mi Casa Publishing 13 Street T-5 Villa Linares Vega Alta, Puerto Rico 00692 2010 PixelOz Designs, Angel David Guzman PixelOz

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COPYRIGHT This document, this e-book Fundamentals Of Paper Model Design With Blender 3D & An Illustration Program is Copyright 2010 of PixelOz Designs and Angel David Guzmn PixelOz. This e-book may not be altered in any way. You may not reproduce this document either partially or as a whole, except as outlined below. Under NO circumstance this document may be sold, auctioned or rented in any way so under NO circumstance can you profit by the sale, rental or distribution of this e-book without permission from the author. Credit & Copyright to PixelOz Designs and Angel David Guzmn must remain in all distribution, in any format. You may distribute this e-book (in unlimited quantity) in its original PDF format, or as a printed booklet provided this e-book is not altered in any way. Content, layout, information and links must remain in the document in their original format. You may make this e-book available for download on your web site free of charge via a link to the e-book on the addresses already given in the book itself, or by placing the e-book on your own server, and linking to the unaltered file on your server. You may offer this e-book as a bonus in any legal promotion (no spam, adware or spyware) provided NO currency value is placed on this e-book anywhere in said promotion. DISCLAIMER While the author has made every effort to provide accurate data and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither PixelOz Designs nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or the results you may have from the use of the data in this e-book, or third party recommended products. Further, the author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party web sites, their products and their content.

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I dedicate this book to my loving family, who have supported and helped me throughout my whole life. I particularly dedicate it to my wonderful mother Norma and my beautiful little niece Natasha.

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Table of Contents
Important Note About Words With Asterisks............................................................................... 9 Introduction................................................................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 1 - Some Things To Clear First........................................................................................ 13
First - A Little About The Old Method Of Paper Model Designing...................................................14

Chapter 2 - Modern Paper Model Design..................................................................................... 17

Some Very, Very Basic Things To Get Out Of The Way....................................................................18 Some Software That Can Be Used To Do The Job.............................................................................19 A Few Important Basic Precautions When Unfolding With Blender.................................................22 Some Other Free 3D Modeling Programs..........................................................................................30 Some Tips About Other Uses For Free 3D Programs.........................................................................30 Some Commercial 3D Modeling Software ........................................................................................31 Some Commercial 3D CAD Software................................................................................................34 Some Commercial Illustration Software............................................................................................ 37 Some Commercial Bitmap Type Image Or Photo Editing Software .................................................39 Some Free 2D CAD Software............................................................................................................ 40 Creating PDFs With CutePDF Writer.................................................................................................41 Unfolding Paper Models With Sheet Metal Unfolders.......................................................................42 A Possible Alternative, A More Economic Option............................................................................. 44 The Confusion Between UV Texture Unfolders And Paper Modeling/Other Unfolders................... 45 B-Paperizer Script Installation............................................................................................................49 The Blender Unfolding Scripts Controls............................................................................................ 51 ............................................................................................................................................................ 52 A New Unfolding Script For Blender 2.5x!........................................................................................54

Chapter 3 - The Methodology Of 3D Paper Model Creation..............................................59 Chapter 4 - Some Important Fundamental Principles Not Well Understood.............62
The Most Basic Shape - The Cube..................................................................................................... 62 Page 6

Other Flat Faced Parts........................................................................................................................ 67 Handling Compound Curves - The Biggest Problem In Paper Model Design...................................70 The Two Directions Of A Compound Curve...................................................................................... 79 A Common Misunderstanding About Quads And Triangles.............................................................. 84 Higher Resolution Textures For More Quality...................................................................................98 Learning From Other Paper Model Designers.................................................................................100 Smoothing And Professional High Polygon Resolution Paper Model Creation..............................101 Combined High Polygons And Low Polygons.................................................................................121 The Subsurface Division Problem....................................................................................................123 Low Polygon In One Direction Only Tricks.................................................................................... 125 Using Path Extrusion........................................................................................................................131 Exceptions To The High Poly Modeling Techniques.......................................................................134 A Little More On How To Separate Some Parts.............................................................................. 137

Chapter 5 - Internal Reinforcements Of 3D Paper Models...............................................144

Most Common Internal Reinforcements..........................................................................................144 Material Thickness Compensation...................................................................................................147 An Old Common Internal Reinforcement Trick...............................................................................148 3D Internal Reinforcements............................................................................................................. 150 Model Interiors.................................................................................................................................151

Chapter 6 - Designing Some Simple Models.............................................................................. 152

Designing A Simple Cartoon Paper Model Airplane........................................................................152 Designing A Simple Airship.............................................................................................................161 Creating A Simple Sea Ship............................................................................................................. 164 Waterline Sea Ships..........................................................................................................................172 Instancing And The Mirror Modifier................................................................................................177 Unfolding The Hull Of A Boat Model..............................................................................................179 Handling The Gluing Tabs At Curves.............................................................................................. 185 Overlapping Tabs And Fixing Bad Looking Corners.......................................................................196 Page 7

A Submarine.....................................................................................................................................199 Character Paper Models................................................................................................................... 201

Chapter 7 - A Bare Bones Way Of Creating Paper Models With A Computer........204 Chapter 8 - Recent Open Source Software Improvements................................................206 Chapter 9 - Other Basic Things That A Designer Should Know and Remember ...209
Include Calibration Lines.................................................................................................................................209 Try To Use The PDF Format............................................................................................................................209 Specify The Scale Of The Model.....................................................................................................................210 Include Wide Margins .....................................................................................................................................211 Try To Use Only A4 Or Letter Size Paper Whenever Possible ......................................................................211 Do Not Use Excess Compression....................................................................................................................212 Try To Create Your Model In Vector Format...................................................................................................213 Give The File Names A More Adequate Or Descriptive Name......................................................................213 Be Careful With The Page Size.......................................................................................................................214 If You Decide To Publish The Model In A Bitmap Type Format Anyway.....................................................216 Precautions With Bitmap Formats And Page Sizes.........................................................................................217 You Don't Always Have To Make The Edge And Fold Lines Black!.............................................................219 Anti-aliasing.....................................................................................................................................................221

Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 224 Glossary....................................................................................................................................................... 227 Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................... 236

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Important Note About Words With Asterisks

o facilitate the understanding of some technical terms I did two things, first after I introduced a term for the first time I put an asterisk immediately after it which means that there is a definition for it in the glossary and then I put an explanation of the term shortly after the asterisk between parenthesis. I know that for people that are already familiar with that term this will be a bit annoying sometimes but this explanation between parenthesis will only appear the very first time the term is introduced of course and that's the same reason that I also included a glossary anyway because if a person wants to find a definition for the term again they won't have to roam through the whole book like crazy trying to find it. The advantage of this method is that every time that you find a new technical term like that you don't have to jump to the glossary and back all the time which can also be a bit annoying sometimes and that you don't have to take your eyes off what you are reading so it's a bit of a tradeoff. Now the definitions between the parenthesis are usually simpler and shorter than those in the glossary so if you want to understand those terms a little better I suggest that you look them up in the glossary too cause there is more information there. These explanations are simple explanations in layman's terms so that anybody can understand them quickly and then continue reading as soon as possible. If you have any doubts about a definition that I give, you can always find much more material about it on the web and for regular words you can always look the term up in a standard dictionary which I highly recommend. I cannot stress this enough, going past words that you do not understand can lead to confusion about what you are reading and another thing that it can do is that it can make you loose interest in what you are reading altogether. When you find a word that you do not understand you should find the correct definition for it in a dictionary. If the material becomes confusing or it seems that you cannot grasp it completely, there will be a word that you did not understand right before that. Do not continue reading, just go back to to the moment before you had any trouble, find the word that you didn't understand and define it. If you do that the end result is that you will get a much better conceptual understanding of what the author of the book was trying to explain to you and it will allow you to maintain interest in what you are reading, try it and with time you will see. Another possibility is to use an on-line dictionary, they are terrific, if you are in a computer you can create a bookmark in your web browser that can quickly take you to an on-line dictionary such as http://www.webster.com which is an excellent English on-line dictionary but there are other on-line dictionaries including idioms, slang, acronyms dictionaries and more. So find some you like through a web search engine and create bookmarks for them in your browser so you can find them very quickly every time. This type of dictionary has many advantages including the fact that is very easy to find a word definition by simply typing the word in a text box so you don't have to roam thought the pages of a physically printed dictionary finding it. Another advantage is that some of them include the pronunciation that you can hear thought your computer sound system. Yet another advantage is that you don't have to get up from the computer to find your dictionary cause it's always very near. One disadvantage is that you have to boot the computer to be able to use one but if you are reading an electronic book just like this one, the problem is usually solved (not always, there are exceptions to this of course cause not all computers are always on-line). What I do is that I use both, I always keep at home physical book dictionaries and I also use the on-line ones, the best of both worlds and presto. This is the modern computer era so take advantage of modern tools!

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Free cartoonish Ford 32 -33 paper model by PixelOz from http://pixeloz.deviantart.com/gallery/

Introduction

he name paper models is actually sort of a misnomer because paper models are really assembled out of thin cardboard (which is called cardstock when you buy it) and only rarely they actually use paper like the regular kind that you use in an office except for one part or the other which is too difficult to do out of thin cardboard or because in the size and scale of the part in a particular model is better to use a thinner material or for other reasons but like I said before that's seldom the case. That's why paper models are also called card models but even if this is a more accurate name you will still see them called paper models in many places so when we use that name from now on you will know that we are referring to thin cardboard models. So why paper models? Before plastic models came, paper models were there (for a much longer time) and well, paper models have advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage against plastic or other type of models is that they do not reproduce compound curves* (compound curves are curved surfaces that bend in two directions at the same time such as those in a sphere but more on that later) as well, this is because the limitation that paper (or thin cardboard) can't usually be curved in two directions at the same time easily, only very slightly so. Paper models usually accomplish the trick of recreating spherical shapes or complex curved surfaces by dividing the surface or area in sections and or different parts and joining those by gluing them together. Now, this method even if it's not as accurate as using plastic or resins or other materials to form these needed shapes can still produce a fairly decent look for a model if the model is well designed and built. Don't be fooled, as you will be able to observe in the pictures in this document and on the Internet, with these tricks of dividing the paper in sections and joining them in certain ways an excellent quality and variety of models can be produced. Another disadvantage of paper models is that it's usually more difficult to put more detail in them than in other type of models because small parts can be challenging to do and sometimes it's a bit involved if the model is of high complexity and/or quality. These disadvantages are something that paper model lovers consider somewhat of the opposite, it is quite amazing to see a flat piece of paper take the complex shape of an airplane or a car or a cathedral like Notre Dame in full 3D. When a paper model is well done and detailed it is quite a beauty to watch. It's interesting to see the expression in Page 10

somebody's face when they ask a paper modeler: Is that made entirely out of paper? and the owner proudly answering yes. Some people are quite astonished when they see a paper model exhibition for the first time and realize that all those beautiful models are made out of thin cardboard only. I think that paper modeling is a bit of a lost art in terms of the mainstream public awareness of it but I don't mean completely. What happened was that in the past the art was getting to be known a bit but when industrialization started to advance and modern manufacturing started to produce the high quality plastic models that are so common these days it overshadowed paper modeling for several decades, after all I'm not saying that paper models are better than plastic and other type of models out there (I personally like all kinds of models if they are of good quality and if they are the object that I want modeled) I'm saying that I think it compliments them and that they are worthy of respect like any other type of model type and as of lately they have made somewhat of a comeback due ironically to the progress of technology again (the printing press advances, the personal computer, advances in software, the Internet and home color printers more than anything). On the other side another advantage of plastic models is that they are sturdier in comparison with paper models particularly in some areas but don't think that paper models are weak because they are made of thin cardboard, they are only slightly so. Paper model are as I explained before actually built of cardstock and many have internal reinforcements parts (like a skeleton) that when combined with the strength of the glue make then quite sturdier than what you think when you see them at first. Some people may think, but if I hit a card model airplane with my fist it will be all screwed up. Have you tried to hit a plastic model with your fist and see what happens? It can receive some serious damage just as well, not as much as a paper model but still a lot, especially in fragile parts that are thin like antennas etc. and by the way why would you want to hit a model with your fist in the first place? I don't, do you see? Only trying to show a point, I have had paper models that lasted me many years. And somebody may say: But if a child enters the room where I have the model he or she could damage the model very badly, well so they can damage a plastic model very badly, the plastic model still has a better probability of survival but it's still in very serious peril in the hands of a child because after all plastic models and other type of models are nowhere near as sturdy as a child toy such as those manufactured by the Fisher Price, Hasbro or Tonka brands and the like. So basically as with any other type of model, you just keep them away from children in a safe place. And yet another advantage of paper models is that they don't require paint because the colors and textures* (textures - the artistic designs painted on the surfaces of 3D and paper models) are already printed and this also eliminates the need for decals and painting camouflage and patterns that are very difficult to do sometimes. This doesn't mean that they never need any painting whatsoever because some people paint the edges (usually the pros) of the parts so that the white seams do not mar the model. This is an optional step but one that I highly recommend. Now, even with painting the edges it's still much easier than painting the whole model and by far and like I said this is an option. Some plastic model advocates will argue that painting the model is one of the things they love about plastic models and that is true and in a similar way paper modelers may say that they like cutting and gluing the parts. I've done many plastic models myself and I know the agony and the ecstasy of painting them but also that acquiring all the paints and the painting equipment (professionals use a small air compressor and an airbrush for different things in addition to brushes) can be quite an expensive proposition so as a general rule plastic modeling if done seriously is much more expensive. So overall it's a matter of personal preference, budget and maybe the mood (I like to do several types of modeling anyway) so the bottom line is that you have more choices in modeling and that paper modeling in particular could offer you a lower cost alternative to other types of modeling if budget is a concern. Another advantage of paper models worth mentioning is that if you have the know how or decide to learn how, it can be easier to do a scratch build model than it is to do it in plastic or resin or other materials and it can be Page 11

much easier to modify an existing model or add to it. One last advantage of paper models (only for those that are free and that you can print at home) that I want to mention is that if a part gets damaged you can print it again and your problem is solved. To fix damaged or broken parts in a plastic model can be very difficult sometimes. Please don't expect perfection in this book, my grammar probably leaves a lot to be desired and I probably have misplaced a plethora of commas and left out quite a few others, I don't have the resources that some publishing houses have to help me with its development and I did all the work of the book alone including all the graphics. My native language is Spanish but I think that my English is fluent enough to explain the concepts of this book well enough and I didn't have anybody close to me that could help me a bit more with grammar corrections, still, I think that it's good enough for anybody to understand what I wanted to explain. I went through the material many, many times to get out as many typos and misspellings as possible but is humanly possible that I missed some. I tried to organize and format it well but it could probably had been organized and formatted even better if I had the time to do more. I did this book with a lot of my spare time and I was involved in other works and a whole web site design that made the work very slow at the end cause then I had too little time to work in it, luckily it was mostly done when this other project came. Yes, the book could be better and I wanted to do more if I had more time, I wanted to include more things cause I knew a lot more things about this that I wanted to share with people but I had to limit it to what I though was more important for the subject and yet I put a lot of material here and take a look at how this book started in the first place in the next paragraph cause it's kinda interesting. A funny thing about this book is that it really started with the idea of creating a mere tutorial cause I had been fascinated with 3D paper models since I was a young kid but back there in the pre-Internet times it was hard for a young boy like me to find much about it. After the personal computer revolution and the web I learned a whole lot more about the subject and I wanted to share with other people some of the things that I had learned about this but then as I was writing it I realized that I wanted to share more ideas and it started to grow and grow. As I continued to write the tutorial I realized that I was learning a lot of new things about the subject myself and I also wanted to share those new things with other people and the next thing you know I had too much material for a simple tutorial and somewhere along that line I made the decision that I was going to write a book instead. So here I introduce you, the new paper model designer to this wonderful hobby of creating 3D paper models, I hope that you really find this material of valuable use. It is my wish that this book can help new designers with some of those things that have the tendency to confuse them at first and that by reading this they can avoid some of the initial pitfalls of paper model design. I hope that this book helps new designers catapult themselves to a much better comprehension of the subject, my best wishes,

Angel David Guzmn - PixelOz

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Chapter 1 - Some Things To Clear First

any of the techniques or methods described in this simple book are based on the Blender 3D software which I'm familiar with but most everything here can be applied to many, many other 3D programs rather easily. Most of the things I mention here are kinda universal and even if I used Blender as a base for this book, one of the reasons I did so is because it's one of the free alternatives available for paper model design and that opens an opportunity for many people that do not have the economic resources to use expensive software but if you can afford to use those it is OK of course. I used the latest full version (production ready) of Blender which at the moment of starting the book was Blender 2.49b as a 3D program and I used CorelDraw version X3 as an illustration program which I posses and that I found ideal but of course the book will work just fine with CorelDraw X4 or X5 or with most recent versions of Adobe Illustrator and other illustration programs. In Illustrator or other illustration programs you do not have the Create Boundary* function (this function creates an outer shape automatically for all the shapes that are selected saving a lot of time) of CorelDraw X3, X4 and X5 as far as I know but the program can still be used just fine cause it's excellent enough and it can be done with most any other illustration program out there of decent enough quality (with a few limitations that I will explain later) including the open source* program Inkscape (open source software is software that is released free of charge to the public under a special license agreement, it also allows you access to the programing code and it's usually created by the on-line community). In this book I mention different techniques, software or software combinations (because sometimes it's a combination of techniques or a software combination that is needed) that can be used to get the job done so if you are not interested in using Blender 3D you have the choice to try those but you have to know that the book is based mainly around this program. If you are an experienced 3D modeler in other 3D software programs like Maya or Lightwave, etc. you may find the fundamentals explained in this book very useful because understanding that come first than software. Don't think that the things I mention here can't be used for other programs cause I will explain some very important principles about the paper model creation process that have the tendency to confuse many designers specially at first and they apply to any 3D program and there is a lot here that has nothing to do with Blender or CorelDraw but with paper model design in general. In other programs some things will be different because modeling in 3D have different methods that vary from program to program but many of them also share many common tools and capabilities that will allow most people with a decent 3D program to do most anything in this book. So your ability to perform most of these things outside of Blender will depend mostly in your knowledge and capability as a 3D modeler in general and there are plenty of resources like many tutorials and forums on-line to help you with that if you are new to 3D modeling and this is in addition to the official help materials and manuals that come with your particular 3D package. This book doesn't pretend to be a full text on the subject of paper model design but I think that it can give the novice designer a few important pointers that can ease the initial confusion and doubts that many new designers have. It doesn't attempt to be a 3D design book either, there are several of those already out there so it assumes that you are already familiar with a 3D modeling or a 3D CAD* package (CAD stands for computer aided design which are digital computer drafting, designing and creation tools that can accelerate a lot the process of creating or engineering a new product). This book tells you that if you want to do a 3D paper model design with a computer you may have to learn a 3D software of your choice first before starting to use it to create paper models (like Blender 3D). What it also tells you is about some of the software available for 3D modeling and CAD and some of those Page 13

available for paper model creation and to tell you some basic things that you need to know in 3D paper model creation in general with 3D software and other things about the subject. Also I want to clear here that all currency stated in this document is in US dollars. And I also want to clear here that when I use the word bitmap or bitmap image I use it in the generic way which means a pixel image like JPG or PNG, etc. and not in the sense of the Bitmap image format of Microsoft Windows unless I specify it. First - A Little About The Old Method Of Paper Model Designing Paper model design used to be done by hand in old times and some people still do it like that nowadays although this is usually better for simpler models only. Simpler geometric figures such as the cube and the pyramid are very easy to unfold* (unfolding is the opening and flattening of the geometric faces or shapes of a 3D model or 3D shape as to make a cutting, folding and gluing [or welding in sheet metal] pattern for paper or for any other flat material such as sheet metal or others) and this is relatively easy to do even by hand drawing and a cylinder it's just a wee bit more difficult but how about the cone? The cone is a very basic figure that is used a lot for many paper model parts depending on the model because it can be done to generate cones themselves but you can generate many other round surfaces such as a sphere with a series of cones (I'll show show many things about that later on). How about an oval cone? (cones in which the base and the top are not perfect circles as shown in the next picture) or how about a cone with the truncation* (a truncated cone means one that doesn't end in a point and has the top chopped off so to speak as shown on the next picture) or the base and/or truncation at at an angle? (that last one is not shown in the next image). Before computers, many calculations and/or measures had to be done by hand and for cones a trigonometric formula was used (It sounds complicated for some people but in reality the formulas for this are relatively easy to learn).

Also drafting tricks and techniques can be used and there are some of those that can for example generate an oval cone and there are drafting tricks that allow you to create cones, truncated cones or truncated cones with the truncation and/or base at an angle and many other 3D geometric shapes and these drafting tricks do not require math but measuring, they are a bit laborious but you don't have to be a genius to use them. These tricks are not difficult to learn and the the mathematics for the flattening of the regular cone are very simple too as I said before, you may find more information about this on the web, if you are interested, try flattening a cone or truncated cone for a search in Google. Cylindrical shapes were done also with geometric calculations (I will say a little bit more about this later) and cubic objects regular or elongated and simple shapes with flat faces were of course the easiest to calculate or unfold. Page 14

By combining some of these basic shapes and other shapes designers were able to do a whole lot but everything was drawn by hand preferably in a drafting table with the correct tools like t-squares, triangles, compasses and other different technical drawing and/or artistic drawing tools. They were colored or painted by hand using different artistic tools such as colored pencils and artists usually use colored pencils of higher quality than those that you buy for children and the difference between those artist colored pencils and those for children is huge for those that do not know. One of the best known high quality colored pencils lines is the Prismacolor from Berol but there are several. They also used watercolor paints and other types of paints, watercolor pencils, magic markers and many other different techniques and of course that didn't always yielded the best results but still some paper models painted or colored in those ways looked very good. There was a lot more trial and error specially because hand made measurements are not as precise as those made in a computer and there was a lot more prototyping. Usually an all white prototype was designed and built first and then corrections were made until the shape of the object was correct and the model parts fitted well with each other. Once the all white model was finished and the final patterns were obtained then the designer painted or colored the surfaces with the proper design or artwork and then final prototypes were built to make sure that the patterns looked good with the fully assembled model. It was a lot of work (it's still a lot of work by computer but far, far less) but the job got done anyway. Here are more details about the drafting techniques that I mentioned before. The following is an address that contains PDF documents on technical drawings that show techniques used for flattening parts: http://wps.prenhall.com/chet_giesecke_9/87/22372/5727237.cw/index.html Select the part titled: Art from text then select chapter 19. You will see many illustrations of different kinds of unfoldings of parts of varied shapes in that particular PDF document. If the address above becomes invalid try a web search for: Giesecke on the Web. This is the book related to those PDFs: Technical Drawing 12 edition, by: Frederick E. Giesecke, Alva Mitchell, Henry C. Spencer, Ivan Leroy Hill, John Thomas Dygdon, James E. Novak Prentice Hall Publishing.

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The PDF I talked about above is a companion to the book but with the PDF itself you may learn how it's done, if not you may need the book or a good drafting course. The book can be a little expensive, well, it is normal for a book of its type (around $115.00) but I've seen used ones in Amazon for about $13.00. It's now in the 13th edition but I don't know if that edition still includes the chapter that shows the unfolding methods, I couldn't find and entry about the subject of unfolding in the table of contents so it's up to you to find out. If you want to be sure buy the 12th edition, it is still a very good edition. The name for this type of drawing technique is called surface development*, (that is the term that is used in drafting and engineering for the flattening of surfaces) and a good drafting course should teach you this, if not you may not have the right course. In addition of course there can be several other books out there that talk about the subject of surface development that you may find.

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Chapter 2 - Modern Paper Model Design

oday with the proliferation of the personal computer, the evolution of its hardware, particularly the graphics hardware and the evolution of graphics software the paper model design process is a whole new ballgame. These advances, together with the advent and evolution of high quality color printing for the home have made paper models do sort of a comeback and you can tell this by the huge number of free high quality paper models that you can download from the Internet and those that are commercial too and how many more are appearing everywhere. The advances in 3D graphic hardware and 3D programs and the appearance of software specifically designed for the construction of paper models has helped a lot with it.

Pepakura Designer software screenshot and a paper model created with it. By the way you can get that Pepakura Dragon model at this location: http://papercraft.wdfiles.com/local--files/papercraft:pepakura-dragon/Pepakura_Dragon.pdf or here: http://pdfdatabase.com/download_file_i.php?file=8853856&desc=Pepakura+Dragon+.pdf Now, how exactly do modern digital paper modelers work and how do they accomplish this task? Many people use their favorite 3D modeling or 3D CAD application to create a 3D model (there are plenty of tutorials for virtually every 3D application out there on how to accomplish the goal of learning how to model in 3D) and then export the 3D model to a format that the Pepakura software (a software specially designed for paper model creation) can import, then of course they import the model to Pepakura which helps you with the unfolding process and the gluing tabs creation. This seems to be one of the favorite process of many paper model creators but there are other ways, many ways. The Pepakura Viewer (to view and print paper models created with Pepakura which are in the PDO format) is free, the Pepakura Designer is not free but cheap (about $38.00). Some people are using the free Google Sketchup 3D software with the commercial Waybe plugin* (a plugin is a special kind of software that you attach to another software to give it additional capabilities) which unfolds the paper model. Some people use Sketchup with the free Unfold plugin from Jim Foltz available for this process (you will find the addresses for these shortly after the next illustration). Page 17

Now, a bit ahead I will list many, many software programs that can be used to do the job but remember that sometimes it takes a combination of software like in the case of Sketchup and Waybe and there are many possible combinations (almost at the end of the book at the Conclusion I mention many possible combination of methods that can be used). I list in this book software of many kinds from the free ones all the way to high end CAD and 3D modeling programs costing thousands of dollars and you might think that it's an overkill to use such expensive software for paper modeling and in most instances that's very true but paper model design is not just done by the hobbyists it's also done by professionals and some people may consider also buying something like 3D Studio because they may want to learn paper model design in addition to 3D modeling and animation or in addition to the other uses a CAD, illustration or bitmap editor software program can have and I want to let them know that many of those programs are perfectly capable for the creation of paper models just as long as they have the correct unfolding software or script* (a piece of programing code that you can attach to another software to give it additional capabilities) or plugin to compliment 3D software. Another reason to include such software in the list is because some people wanting to learn paper modeling already have such software and then they can see that it can be used for paper modeling too and they can see how to use it for such a purpose in this book. Like I said, in many instances you can do it for very little money or even for free, it depends on what you feel is the best way to accomplish this. Some Very, Very Basic Things To Get Out Of The Way The following is something that any 3D modeler knows cold, it's the very first thing they learn so if you are a 3D modeler already skip these four paragraphs cause it's for people that are newbies and will want to learn 3D modeling in order to learn paper model design. It's not that I will teach 3D modeling here as I stated before, I will not, it's outside the scope of this material but these basic terms are something that anybody has to be familiar with in order to understand 3D computer paper model design. For those that are not familiar with 3D terms and do not remember too well their basic geometry in the next image, in the picture on the left the blue dots are vertexes* (also called vertices in plural - from Latin which means corner), the green lines in the middle picture are the segments* which are the lines that connects the vertexes with each other and the third picture to the right are the red faces* or polygons* (the basic geometric shapes that make a 3D model, they are usually flat but not necessarily so as you will see better later, you could say that they are the lids that cover those vertexes and segments) and they have been separated for the purpose of visualization of this explanation. The ones that we are concerned with the most are the ones in the picture to the right, the faces or polygons, so whenever you see the words faces or polygons in this document you will know that that is what we are talking about. When you hear the term high poly or high polygonal resolution we are referring to a 3D model made of a larger quantity of those polygons or faces and if you see the term low poly or low polygonal resolution is of course the opposite of that which is a 3D model made with a low quantity of those faces or polygons. This is not to be confused with the normal term high resolution that you hear all the time in computers, that refers to images made with larger amounts of pixels which are the dots that comprise a digital image like the dots in your computer monitor or the dots of an image in a bitmap type graphics editor such as Photoshop or The Gimp. There is high polygon resolution for 3D geometry and high pixel resolution for images and you will see both things mentioned several times throughout this document. Page 18

If you are an experienced 3D modeler and you are still reading this don't think that it's not necessary to explain terms like these, never assume that because you understand something well everybody else does. I've seen people that were fairly smart and did not understand what the dot that close a sentence meant, nobody ever explained it to them well enough, yes, it does happen. I didn't write this for the erudite, I wrote this for anybody interested in learning computer 3D paper model design so I tried to use layman's terms as much as possible and you may find a couple things here about paper model design that you didn't know and if you don't perhaps you may be kind enough to pass it forward to people that are trying to learn this. So that's that.

Some Software That Can Be Used To Do The Job Here I will give a list of many software programs that can be used to design paper models but remember that many times people use a combination of software to do the job instead of a single program. As you go through this book you will see better some different possibilities. I provided many links to many things in this book and of course links can become invalid with time. If you get a link that is no longer good try a search on the web with your favorite search engine such as Google or any other, if for example the links to any of the paper models become invalid such as the dragon up there you may try in Google: Pepakura dragon or Pepakura dragon paper model or something similar and if the links to any of the software programs become invalid try a search for their name such as DoubleCAD XT or DoubleCAD XT software or Adobe Illustrator or anything like that and usually you will find many links to those respective programs home pages or to other places related to those programs. It's usually not that difficult to find the official web site for the companies of software programs. Many of the prices given here are street prices and it's very real to find many places where you can get these software at such prices and they are not student or academic versions, all prices are for full versions (I searched all of them). For some programs the only price available is one because they are available only at their official web site because not all programs are available in third party online stores but those are far in between. I used the terms retail or from home web site and they mean the same. Of course the prices given here are subject to change. Google Sketchup It is free in the simpler version but it's quite capable, yes with the free version you can do a whole lot. Version 7 - It's $495.00 for the pro version from home web site and available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and also for Mac OS X (10.4+) : http://sketchup.google.com/

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Waybe plugin Version 2.4, $50.00 hobby version, $80.00 education version and $200.00 full commercial version, all prices are from home web site: http://waybe.weebly.com/ Unfold This is a free unfolding plugin for Sketchup from Jim Foltz as an alternative. Some people say it's pretty good and I tried it and it works but it is not as good or as easy to unfold with it as it is with Waybe or with the Blender unfolding scripts cause you have to click face by face to unfold them and with other tools this is more automated: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/cad-addict/700b17a13099b02129604e5ad2d622c5 Pepakura Designer by Tama Software. Version 3, ($38.00 from home web site). It takes models in different 3D formats and unfolds them to create 3D paper model sheets. In the Tama web site you will also find the free Pepakura Viewer that will allow you to view and print models in the Pepakura PDO format. Pepakura can import 3D models in the following formats: Metasequoia (Mqo) (Recommended by Tama, highest compatibility, free LE version available.) Wavefront (Obj) AutoCAD 3D (Dxf) 3DS Max (3ds) Lightwave (Lwo) Binary/ASCII STL (Stl) Google Earth4 (Kml, Kmz) Collada (Dae) Export formats include: Windows Bitmap (Bmp) Windows Enhanced Metafile (Emf) Encapsulated Postscript (Eps) Ahead in the commercial 3D software section you will find more info about the Pepakura companion 3D program Metasequoia (not produced by Tama Software). Pepakura is available here: http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/ Ultimate Papercraft 3D This is another program which is newer than Pepakura that works very similar to Pepakura Designer allowing you to import your 3D models in many different formats and then unfolding the parts to create the sheets. Price is $39.95 for version 1.09 from home web site. Ultimate Papercraft 3D import file formats: Collada (Dae) Autodesk (Fbx/3ds) AutoCAD (Dxf) Lightwave (Lwo) Page 20

 WaveFront (Obj) Google SketchUp DirectX Stereo Lithography (Stl) Metasequoia (Mqo) Ultimate Unwrap3D (U3d) Export formats include: Windows Bitmap (Bmp) AutoCAD (Dxf) WaveFront (Obj) Encapsulated Postscript (Eps) Windows Enhanced Metafile (Emf) Postscript (Pdf using PDFCreator). It's available from: http://www.papercraft3d.com/ Blender 3D Blender is another free way of doing this and a very good alternative. It is an open source program and it's available for Windows (for several versions), Mac, Linux and other platforms: http://www.blender.org/

Blender 2.49b screenshot. Blender includes a script that you can run from the script manager called Unfold that flattens the parts, it's not as easy to use as Pepakura or Waybe with Sketchup, you have to add the gluing tabs manually later, either right there in Blender or in a graphics program preferably a vector* illustration program (a vector illustration or drawing is basically a drawing made of lines and curves which are saved by the software as a mathematical representation as opposed to a pixel drawing which is Page 21

comprised of a series of dots) cause it is easier after exporting the flattened SVG file. For illustration software people use programs such as Illustrator, CorelDraw, the free open source Inkscape or others. Inkscape Free open source illustration program and getting pretty good already. http://www.inkscape.org Here is a basic tutorial of how to use Blender for paper modeling and a special method for adding detailed textures with shadows but that part of the tutorial is a bit more advanced: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101194 There is another Blender unfolding script that I think works even better than the one that Blender includes and is not so well known and it's called B-Paperizer by Czestmyr (estmr Houka) from the Czech republic and this other script will be essential to the methods of this book with Blender. The reasons that this other script is important will be much more clear later on as I get to explain many other things but essentially this other script handles larger quantity of polygons much better which use is something that later on you will understand better. I am including this script with the zip file of this book but I also give the link to the place where you can find it in case it's updated. At the moment of publishing this book the script works with Blender versions up to 2.49b. A Few Important Basic Precautions When Unfolding With Blender Before you get these scripts to work at all you have to know that some Blender scripts (including the unfolding scripts) will require the separate installation of the full version of Python programing language* (Python is a free open source computer programing language that's available from http://www.python.org/ and the one in which Blender 3D is written) in order for them to work. Blender already includes Python but it is not the full Python version. Many open source applications are written in the Python language which has become quite popular nowadays. You have to go there and download the correct Python installer for your particular operating system. In addition, only download that version that matches your Blender (you can identify which version of Python it requires in the Blender download page). There are automatic installers that are compatible with many different Windows operating systems and there are installers available for different Linux distributions but you have to find out which one is available for your particular Linux version. In Linux you don't always find software compiled for your particular Linux distribution in the software home web site so if that is the case you usually have to download it from an official software repository that is made for your particular Linux version and many times the repositories from which you can download something like Python are already linked to a package manager* (a system in Linux operating systems by which you can download, install, upgrade or remove software for a particular Linux version and there are several of them which vary according to a particular Linux distribution too) which as many Linux users know is one of the main methods that a Linux distribution has to download and acquire official versions of a particular software and these package managers usually have a GUI* (a graphical user interface) that makes it easier to do this. As for Macintosh, the Mac OS has been coming together with Python already pre-installed for a while and the latest Macintosh operating system version at this moment is Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) and it comes with the 2.6.1 Python distribution pre-installed which is good enough for the unfolding scripts. I suggest that you install a 32 bit version instead of a 64 bit version of Python in Windows or Linux cause the 64 bit version may conflict with the unfolding scripts. The Unfold script doesn't work in my Blender 64 bit version so I have a 32 bit Blender version running from a folder for running the script. The B-Paperizer script works fine in my computer with Blender 64 Page 22

bit but only with Python 32 bit. Blender 2.5x to 2.6x will include its own full Python integrated so it will no longer require a separate installation as Blender version 2.49b still does but the unfolding scripts do not work yet with the new Blender 2.53 Beta, it's likely that their respective authors will fix the scripts for the final Blender 2.6x release and hopefully before that (see chapter 8 - Recent Open Source Software Improvements for more information on the new Blender version). In Blender you can see in the console the second message line that says: Checking for installed Python...got it! and that means that it has found an installed version of Python and you are set. If the second and third lines that appear in the console say something like: 'import site' failed; use -v for traceback Checking for installed Python...No installed Python found etc. it means that either full Python has not been installed in your computer or that for any of a number of reasons it has not found the full Python that you have in your computer but this is very rarely the case. In the first case in which you have not installed full Python you already know what to do but if you do get one of those occasions in which Blender doesn't find your installed full Python (again, very rarely) you can ask for help in Blender forums on the Internet. I found a lot of help there in occasions like that. In Windows you always see the console start right before the main program window itself. In my experience with Linux I never saw the console unless I started Blender from a terminal window (and that window is your console), there may be other ways but that's how I used to do it if I wanted to see the console. In Macintosh the process is very similar because Mac OS X is based on Unix* (an operating system that originated at Bell Labs in 1969). Linux is another operating system that is Unix based. In Macintosh some people manage by opening a terminal window and launching Blender from there. Now, when using these scripts in Blender there are some basic rules that you have to follow in order for them to operate properly: 1. Remove double vertexes by using the remove doubles function which appears by selecting an object and then pressing the Tab key to toggle to Edit Mode. Look for the button in the Mesh* Tools tab (a mesh is a 3D object made of vertexes and/or segments and/or faces, it is a 3D model in its simplest form but there are other types of 3D objects), the button is called: Rem Doubl and if you don't see the Mesh Tools tab press F9 to switch to the Editing panel). After you enter Edit Mode press the A key (to select or deselect so you may have to press it twice depending on something being preselected or not already) and in that way you select all the vertexes or segments or polygons depending on which mode you are in (Vertex Select Mode [Ctrl+Tab+1], Segment Select Mode [Ctrl+Tab+2] or Face Select Mode [Ctrl+tab+3]). The important thing is that independently of which of those three modes you are in, when you select everything in your model in Blender if there is a double vertex in it on one of the corners or somewhere else it will be removed by the Rem Doubl function and the adjacent segments to those double vertexes will be joined (then the double vertexes will become a single vertex). If you want to you can pres the B key to use a selection marquee (a selection line and in this case rectangular shaped) to select all the things inside the marquee. After selecting all the vertexes in your 3D model press the Rem Doubl button and that will weld those double vertexes together. The number besides the Rem Doubl button labeled Limit: is the amount that you specify as the threshold of how far or how close your vertexes have to be in order to be affected by the remove doubles function but it is usually set at 0.001. 2. Recalculate all normals* outside (normals are sort of like the direction toward which the polygonal faces that comprise a 3D model point to and there are vertex normals too) by selecting all faces first (with the A key you might have to hit it twice depending on you having or not anything previously selected) and then with Ctrl+N select Recalculate normals outside (this also takes care of those ugly black spots and/or lines that sometimes appear after editing a model in Blender). Page 23

3. In Object Mode (instead of Edit Mode - toggle with the Tab key) select an object and press Ctrl+A and then select the first item on the menu that appears (Scale and Rotation to ObData Ob means Object) to put the scale factor to 1.0. You can see the scale factor in the Transform Properties window that you can access by pressing the N key with the cursor over the 3D View display. These are the numbers in the lower left corner of the small window that appears (ScaleX:, ScaleY:, and ScaleZ:). If these 3 numbers are not 1.0 in all of them the parts will distort out of proportions when using the unfolding scripts. 4. You might have to divide your model in some smaller group of faces to make the job easier for the unfolding scripts by selecting faces in edit mode and then pressing the P key and in the menu that appears choosing Selected to separate those selected faces and turn them into another object and then unfolding that simpler group of faces of that new object. It is sometimes impossible to unfold a model because it's too complex and then the faces would overlap no matter how hard you try and that's why it's necessary to create some models in smaller sections or to separate it in smaller parts or groups of faces after it is created specially if the model is too complex. This is something that takes a little bit of practice to do and you can learn more about it by watching how other paper models that have been created by other people are separated. Observe how some of the parts for some other models have been created, observe how some of the faces have been grouped together and made a separate piece like for example the canopy of an airplane or a spaceship, the wheel of a car, etc., see how sometimes the faces of a part like that have been separated into another group that you have to glue and assemble to then attach to the rest of the model. By observing this and assembling a few paper models before getting into designing them you can learn a lot of how this is done. If you have a lot of experience assembling paper models it will help, the more the merrier. 5. Another precaution that you have to observe with the Unfold script in particular is that all quads* (quadrilaterals as they are also called are polygonal faces with four vertexes, but more on that later) must be flat but this is not always possible in more complex models with lots of quads (again, more on that later) and in those cases it may be possible to use the B-Paperizer script instead. Now, there is a way to flatten a quad by selecting its four vertexes and changing the orientation to Normal and then by using the Scale manipulator mode (Ctrl+Alt+S) and scaling while holding the Ctrl key until you reach zero. The problem with this is that then you have to do the same to adjacent faces and then you have to go back to the first face and do it again and go back to the adjacent faces and keep cycling back and forth a bit until they are all fairly flat, this is cumbersome and in a scenario with too many faces it just doesn't work so it has very limited use and because of that the other option that you have is to convert those quads that are not flat to triangles, you can select those quad faces that are not flat and use the Convert to Triangles function (Ctrl+T) but you only need to do it for those faces that are not flat, and only those and only the Unfold script can unfold flat quads and triangles combined. If you want to you can select all the faces and convert all the quads to triangles but this is just an option and the quads keep the geometry simpler. 6. With the B-Paperizer script it is different, there are a couple extra precautions and one is that you have to select everything and then turn all quads into triangles no matter what before unfolding and then you have to select the cutting edges before using the unfold function forcefully and also sometimes even after doing all this for one reason or another I had to click the Unfold button twice because after pressing it once I only got one triangle so I deleted it and then pressed the Unfold button again and then it worked fine. This just happens here and there but the script works all right. So that's one important difference from the Unfold script, that with the B-Paperizer script turning everything to triangles is not an option. Before you think that this script makes things harder for you let me tell you Page 24

that I found that this script actually works better than the built in Unfold script of Blender in many instances and I have to explain to you why because the reason I found behind it was a fundamental misunderstanding about quads and triangles and in the section entitled: A Common Misunderstanding About Quads And Triangles I will explain this better and I think that if you are a paper model designer you should read that section. Again, if you want to export to SVG you have to run the pattern through B-Paperizer first just like with the Unfold script. It takes a bit of practice with Blender but it's quite powerful. What I do is to export the SVG file of the unfolded parts using the Unfold script buttons and then I import the SVG into CorelDraw X3 for rearrangement and editing and for applying vector artwork and texturing and creating gluing tabs and then I save the model sheets as a CorelDraw file and I keep a copy of this original artwork for editing and then I save the model sheets again as a PDF file from CorelDraw itself when I am done. Illustrator, CorelDraw and Serif DrawPlus make rearrangement of the parts very easy with the Smart Guides (in Illustrator from versions 8 to CS5), the Dynamic Guides (In CorelDraw in versions 12 to X5) and with Serif's DrawPlus in which they are also called Dynamic Guides (only available since version X4 of DrawPlus) which are very, very similar in the three programs and all terrific tools. With the Dynamic Guides on in CorelDraw (View menu - Dynamic Guides) for example you can take the object or group of objects (a polygonal face or group of polygonal faces) by a node* (nodes are the points in a vector object that you use to edit and change its shape such as the corners of a square or the ends of a curve or the middle points in a curve that also allow you to modify its shape, they are sometimes called control points in other programs) and snap that node to another's object node (a corner for example) and click twice on the object to show the Rotation Handles and the Rotation Center (pivot point) and then you can move the Rotation Center by clicking it and holding the mouse button and dragging it to snap it to that corner node very easily (because of the Dynamic Guides) and then you can grab the object by one of the segments (a lot of times straight lines in paper models) or by one of the nodes by clicking it and holding the mouse button down and then rotating the object and snapping the segment or node that you selected to the other object's segment or node while the first selected pivoting point or node stays perfectly in the same place (the original mentioned corner). This allows rotation of the parts and aligning of them with one another with ease and that allows you to rearrange the parts that you imported from Blender very easily. Let me explain better what I just said: In CorelDraw you can activate the Dynamic Guides by going to the View menu and selecting Dynamic Guides or by pressing these keys: Shift+Ctrl+D.

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Here you have two objects that you are going to rearrange.

The next thing you do is to put the cursor over one of the nodes and left mouse click on it and hold it to then drag the object to the other object's node.

Now you snapped the selected object to the other object by one if its nodes. You selected which node you were going to use to pull the selected object and you selected the node in the other object that you wanted to use as a snapping point.

Next, you left mouse click on the selected object (in this case I clicked in the object''s edge) so you can see the Rotation Handles.

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Here the Rotation Handles and the Center of Rotation (pivot point) have appeared.

Here you left mouse click in the selected object Center of Rotation then hold the button down and drag the pivot center to the corner node to snap it to it.

After that the Center of Rotation is perfectly aligned to the center of the corner node.

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All that you have to do now is to left mouse click in the selected object edge and hold the button down to drag the edge of the selected object to the other object's edge.

As you can see, the edge of the selected object has snapped to the edge of the other object and the two objects edges are perfectly aligned with each other. You can group two or more objects and rearrange them the same way, it doesn't have to be a single object. After grouping various objects you then double click on them to see the Rotation Handles and the Center of Rotation of the group which you can move in the same way, then you just rotate the whole group. In Adobe Illustrator the process is not exactly the same but it's very, very similar, the main difference being that in Illustrator you don't activate the rotation of an object by double clicking on it but by selecting the rotation icon in the toolbox:

In Serif DrawPlus it is also very similar but you rotate an object by clicking an object only once and then getting the cursor close to one of the corners and waiting for the rotation icon to appear and then by clicking on that icon and dragging the mouse. To activate the Smart Guides in Illustrator you go to the View menu and select Smart Guides or press the keys Ctrl+U. In Serif DrawPlus X4 you activate the Dynamic Guides by clicking the black arrow in the Snapping icon on the Standard toolbar:

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In the drop down menu that appears you select Options... and in the dialog box that appears check the box labeled Dynamic Guides and you can also check there Snap to Vertex if so desired to assist you further by snapping to vertexes. Serif DrawPlus X4 also allows you to configure the Dynamic Guides to activate or deactivate by creating a key combination of your choice. Unfortunately Inkscape and many other vector drawing programs do not have this terrific function yet so it's harder to rearrange parts in them but it's still doable. The difference in many other programs is that that last step, the one where you grab the segment of the second object that you are rotating to snap it to the segment of the first object cannot be done by snapping it automatically because you can only rotate those objects dynamically (with the mouse) by grabbing them from the rotation handles and not by their segments so that last step has to be done by hand. In most other illustration programs (and I'm not including CAD programs here because some of them provide similar Smart Guides/Dynamic Guides like functions) you can only do all the way to the previous step before that which was to snap the Rotation Center to the mentioned node, after that you have to rotate but then align the segment of the second object to the segment of the first one by eye in which case some zooming in will help. That's why with intelligent snapping guides is just much faster and easier. After using these tools I started to think that it's a snapping method that should become a standard option in vector illustration programs but unfortunately I have not seen any signs in other vector illustration companies or open source groups that they will incorporate such a thing in their programs at least at the moment. I was hoping that the latest versions of Xara Xtreme (now Xara Designer) that were released would include it (versions 5 and 6 and version 6 was released very shortly ago) but I was disappointed to see that it was not the case, for Xara Designer being a program growing so powerful so fast and being a pioneer in many things that other vector programs implemented afterward it was somewhat disappointing to see that they haven't incorporated it yet in their software in these later versions, they did improve their snapping functions which is a step in the right direction but believe me that still is not the equivalent of Dynamic Guides or Smart Guides. Xara Designer is still a very powerful vector illustration software but I wouldn't give up the CorelDraw Dynamic Guides, Illustrator's Smart Guides after using them, oh no, I like them too much. Serif's DrawPlus X4 is now the other alternative with them, perhaps if the users of those other illustration programs petitioned this enough to their respective companies they might do something about it and incorporate something similar in their software programs. I have seen some people petition this for Inkscape but there is still no sign in the near future that it will be incorporated in it as far as I know, perhaps again, like I said, people haven't asked for this enough yet, perhaps these tools are not so well known yet but believe me if you use an illustration software like for example technical illustrations and some types of modern artwork and logo making and you learn how to use these tools you won't want to live without them, it's a pity that in the open source world there is no equivalent available yet, perhaps in the future. I have seen some people complain about this tool because they say that they are a nuisance, that it gets in the way, yes for artistic drawing it is kinda bad, with the more irregular or more loose kind of art it doesn't work so well or at all but with the type of art that is more angular like some types of modern art or like in logos and for technical drawings and for paper modeling is terrific and after all, this tool can be turned on and off with a simple keystroke, combination of keystrokes, by selecting an Page 29

item from a menu or by clicking on an icon so you can work with it or without it any time you want. I myself turn the Dynamic Guides on and off in CorelDraw X3 all the time depending on what I'm working on and if you don't like it you can just decide to never turn it on, is that simple, so why complain if the program has it? There are plenty of persons that find very good uses for this tool and I'm one of them. The error that many artists made was that they started to use the tool and then saw those lines and labels appearing all over and because of this first impression they though that it was just annoying but this is only true for more irregular artwork like I said and this happened because they didn't stay with the tool long enough to really understand how, where and when to use it and some of them didn't realize that you could just toggle it on and off at will easily and use it precisely like that and because of this they never got to see the tremendous time saver that it is for some types of artwork, you just have to continue to practice with it until you know for what things it is good and for what it is not and for what it is good it is very, very good. Some Other Free 3D Modeling Programs K3D 3D modeling program (not related in any way to the Linux KDE desktop) and it's another free open source 3D program available for different versions of Windows and Linux and the Macintosh version has been released recently. As far as I know it doesn't include unfolding functions for paper modeling or sheet metal yet so you would have to use it with something like Pepakura Designer. http://www.k-3d.org

K3D 0.8 screenshot. Anim8tor Only available for Windows (from 95 to XP and it still has a few issues in Vista). Again, to be used with something like Pepakura Designer too. http://www.anim8or.com Some Tips About Other Uses For Free 3D Programs The following text (all the way to the next section with a blue title) it's a bit off the subject of paper modeling so if you are not interested in 3D animation you may skip it. I decided to include it because if you do learn 3D modeling for paper model design it's possible that you may also pick up some interest in 3D rendering* and animation (rendering is a process of taking a 3D model created by a 3D program Page 30

such as a 3D modeling and animation program or a 3D CAD program and the like and generating a pixel image of such a model to be saved as a bitmap type image). This is just a tip that I wanted to share with you. An advantage of free 3D programs is that if you decide to use them for purposes other than paper model design later on, like rendering animations you don't have to pay an expensive license for any other additional computers in which you install the software, it doesn't matter if you have 10 or 100 computers, the software is still free. In the case of Blender there are scripts and programs that allow you to create a render farm* (that's what it's called for a setup of many networked computers dedicated to the task of rendering 3D pictures). When you have many computers they can render other frames of the animation to finish much faster. I don't know about that kind of software for K3D or Anim8tor but even if you don't have that kind of software it's possible to use other computers effectively for animation by designating other frames to be rendered in other computers manually. Because you don't have to pay any licenses for other copies of the software you can install as many copies as you want to create other rendering stations. It can be done effectively because in animations it's normal to have a single computer take many minutes, hours or even more to render a single frame depending on the complexity of a scene (and animations normally require about 24 to 30 frames of animation per second). It's relatively easy to manually allocate frames to other PCs for rendering when the time frame for a single frame rendering is that high, I've done it successfully and if you are thinking of sneaker net* (to run from one computer to the other on foot with files transported in a portable media such as a USB electronic memory device), it's not necessarily so because if you have several computers they can be accessed or controlled from a single computer with some programs that Windows XP and Vista include or with some other software like VNC (with VNC you can control different platforms from a single one like controlling some Windows and Linux machines from a single Windows computer through the network and more) and even if you do use sneaker net it can be done effectively for animations that can take that long to render and sneaker net can also be used if you do not have a network. So let's say that you have an animation that is 1 minute long and that would be 1440 frames that you have to render for a 24 frame per second animation, you would tell your 3D program to render frames from 1 to 720 in one computer and open the file in the other computer and tell it to render frames from 721 to 1440 and that's it. If you have more than two computers you divide the frames accordingly and if the computers are different in power and speed you may estimate or learn to estimate how to distribute the frames in different amounts. When the particular computers have finished the assigned frames you may redistribute some of the remaining frames again to compensate for the margin of error of your estimate, you see? What you are doing is to manage the distribution of the rendered frames manually. A network rendering manager does this automatically and if you don't have it you become that software. The longer the rendering times are per frame the more irrelevant doing this automatically becomes unless you have a huge rendering farm with two many computers and your animation is way too long, still there are many times in which a good job can be done by hand and efficiently enough. And now let's go back to the subject of paper modeling. Some Commercial 3D Modeling Software These programs may be used together with Pepakura or Ultimate Papercraft 3D, they may also be used with unfolding scripts or plugins if they are available but I don't know if there are, perhaps: Page 31

3D Studio Max From Autodesk. Retail price goes from $3,495.00 to $3,990.00 for version 2011 cause there are 4 slightly different versions of the license so visit their web site to get more information about that. It's possible to get it for a few hundred dollars less in some retailers of the product: http://www.autodesk.com/

3D Studio Max Design 2011 screenshot. Softimage XSI From Autodesk. Retail price (Windows versions) for Softimage XSI 2011 is from $2,995.00 to $3,790.00 depending on version from home web site. Again you can get a better price from some retailers of the program. http://www.autodesk.com/ Carrara $149.95 for Carrara 8, $274.98 for Carrara 8 Pro from home web site. Available here: http://www.daz3d.com/ Cinema 4D From Maxon, around $995.00 retail (about $945.00 street) for the core (basic) package which is probably more than enough for paper modeling of course, $2,495.00 retail (about $2,370.00 street) for Cinema 4D XL Bundle and $3,695.00 retail (about $3,510.00 street) for Studio Bundle full version and these prices are for version 11.5: http://www.maxon.net/ Lightwave From NewTek, version 9.6 ($895.00 from home web site with PDF manual, $995.00 with printed manual). Very powerful 3D software used in special effects and games too: http://www.newtek.com/

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Lightwave 9.6 screenshot. TouchCAD From Lundstrm Design ($795.00 retail) for version 3.6. It is a combined 3D modeling and unfolding program. It comes for Windows and Mac. Home page: http://www.touchcad.com/ FormZ From AutoDesSys, version 6.7 - $1,125.00 retail ($1,121.00 street). Form Z is a 3D modeling program that includes many unfolding features including the ability to generate gluing tabs. Form Z RenderZone Plus is the same program but it includes photo-realistic rendering features based on the Lightworks renderer and costs $1,499.00 retail ($1,419.00 street). Render Plus upgrade for regular version $399.00 retail ($379.00 street) which turns the regular version into a RenderZone version. Link to their web site: http://www.formz.com/ Link to the unfolding functions page, click in Unfolding in the list to the right: http://www.formz.com/products/formz/formzFeatures.html Bonzai 3D Also from AutoDesSys, version 2.0 - $499.00 retail ($449.00 street). This software is capable but it doesn't include unfolding like Form Z so if you want to use it you will have to acquire something like Pepakura or Ultimate Papercraft 3D. It can use the $399.00 retail ($379.00 street) RenderZone plugin too like FormZ. MetasequoiaLE It is free but the full Metasequoia version costs $45.00 (version 2.4.10) from home web site. It is a very simple 3D modeler distributed as shareware but is highly compatible with Pepakura Designer. This is their web address:

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http://www.metaseq.net Direct link to English language page: http://www.metaseq.net/english/index.html Some Commercial 3D CAD Software AutoCAD From Autodesk. Retail price is from $3,995.00 to $4,425.00 (there are 4 slightly different versions of the license, visit their web site to see more information about it) for version AutoCAD 2011 but it's possible to get it for a few hundred dollars less in some retailers of the product. Very powerful, industry standard and very widely supported: http://www.autodesk.com/

AutoCAD 2011 screenshot. Rhinoceros Sort of a hybrid 3D CAD and modeling program in one ($995.00 retail, $780.00 street) for version 4.0. Quite powerful too. For the Rhino software there are several types of unfolding plugins of different prices but I don't know which ones or/if any of them are appropriate for paper model creation, maybe some are. Some people just open the faces of the models manually with some sort of rotation and snapping function in Rhino and 3D CAD software with similar functionality but this is only good for simpler lower polygonal resolution models. Check this link: http://www.tjpgraphics.com/html/paper_models1.htm This tutorial was written for Rhino version 2 so I wouldn't be surprised if the current version of Rhino (4.0) does this even better. Some modern CAD software have sophisticated snapping functions similar to this or something that is very similar to the Smart Guides in Illustrator (or the CorelDraw or Serif DrawPlus X4 equivalent) but in 3D instead of just two axes and it's possible that this can help to accelerate the creation of 3D models and paper models and it might help with manual unfolding in many cases like in the tutorial before but again this is usually only good for simpler paper models, for Page 34

more complex paper models it's usually better to access some sort of unfolding plugin or unfolding software as mentioned before and you will understand this better on more advanced sections of this book. Link to the Rhinoceros software's web site: http://www.rhino3d.com/

Rhinoceros 4 (Rhino) 3D screenshot. TurboCAD Pro Platinum From IMSI, $1495.00 retail ($1,296.00 street), The Pro Platinum version includes unfolding sheet metal functions through the use of the unbend and unfold functions. TurboCAD Pro, $1,295.00 ($1,166.00 street). TurboCAD Pro Platinum Competitive Upgrade (for owners of many other software packages including CorelDraw check complete list of qualifying software at their web site, $799.95 Pro Platinum and $699.95 for Pro from home web site). These prices are for version 17 of the software but in version 17 the mechanical and architectural add-ons are included integrated as the Pro Platinum version and if you want them for the Pro version you can buy later on an upgrade to the Pro Platinum version. This is an upgrade that converts the Pro version into the full Pro Platinum version. What you buy is an activation code that activates these functions that are already present after you installed the Pro version. TurboCAD is also available for Macintosh but I have not seen a Platinum version of the software in Mac version, only a Pro version so I don't know if it includes the unbend and unfold tools but I don't think so. If you want to know for sure drop them an e-mail or ask in the TurboCAD forum: http://www.turbocad.com/

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TurboCAD 17 Pro screenshot. ProgeCAD Professional From ProgeSoft, $296.00 single user, version 2010 Pro. (There are other licences with other prices with certain variations, check their web site for more information). ProgeCAD is very compatible with AutoCAD files, very easy to learn for AutoCAD users, reads AutoCAD files all the way to AutoCAD version 2010, very similar in interface and functionality for a much smaller price (for about a tenth of the price): http://www.progesoft.com/ VariCAD From Modern Visions For Technology. ($610.00 full license, $250.00 one year upgrade, $730.00 with one year upgrade included - retail prices for version 2010 2.01) includes sheet metal unfolding functions: http://www.mv4t.com/

VariCAD 2010 2.01 screenshot.

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SolidWorks From Dassault Systmes SolidWorks Corp. It costs $3,995.00 for standard version, $5,495.00 retail for Professional version and $7,995.00 retail for Premium version. All prices are for 2010 version. Professional high end 3D CAD program that includes sheet metal unfolding functions. Very capable and widely used in the industry. http://www.solidworks.com/ Solid Edge From Siemens. Costs about the same as Solid Works, some people say that Solid Edge is easier to learn but that Solid Works is more industry standard but overall they are both very, very capable 3D CAD software. It is currently on version 20. http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ Some Commercial Illustration Software Illustrator From Adobe ($599.00 retail, $570.00 street for CS5 version). Best, industry standard but pricey, but it still doesn't have a Create Boundary (CorelDraw) tool equivalent which is very good for paper modeling, still, it is very powerful illustration software and it has Smart Guides which is a plus: http://www.adobe.com/

Illustrator CS5 screenshot. CorelDraw Graphics Suite From Corel Corp. ($499.00 retail, around $350.00 street) for X5 version. Closest in my opinion in features to Illustrator and surpassing it in some at a better price, it's very capable and remember that if you have CorelDraw or CorelDesigner you may obtain TurboCAD from IMSI at a much lower price if you buy it through the competitive upgrade option: http://www.corel.com/

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CorelDraw X5 screenshot. Serif DrawPlus X4 New improved version from Serif includes Dynamics Guides like CorelDraw! and it has speed improvements and other improvements too. ($99.00 retail, $85.00 street). Very capable, good value, could be a good alternative to the pricier ones: http://www.serif.com/ Unfortunately the ones above are as far as I know the only ones of this group with the Smart Guides (Illustrator) or Dynamic Guides (Corel's equivalent), now Serif's DrawPlus X4 joins this group too cause it has added Dynamic Guides very similar to those in CorelDraw. Just like I mentioned in the previous version of this e-book (1.0 Edition) that could happen in the near future this capability has just been added to DrawPlus X4 (not available in DrawPlus X3) and again I wouldn't be surprised to find more illustration programs in the near future that also start to include this powerful tool or an equivalent because they have improved markedly in the last few years. Now, many of these software packages come with standard snapping functions like snap to grid or snap to object which could help a lot in rearranging parts too. With the addition of Dynamic Guides and other improvements DrawPlus X4 has become an even greater value in the illustration software sector. Xara Designer (formerly Xara Xtreme) Renamed in new version 6 to Xara Photo and Graphic Designer in the cheaper version and Designer Pro for the more expensive version. From Xara Group Ltd. Fastest vector illustration software $89.00 from home web site, ExtremeDesigner Pro $299.00 from home web site too, good value, very fast and very capable (probably fastest vector illustration software in industry and in graphics in general). All prices are for version 6 of the software: http://www.xara.com/

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Xara Designer Pro 6 screenshot Canvas From ACD Systems International Inc. Version 11, $349.99 retail ($330.00 street). This software is sort of a dual vector and bitmap editor in one and also quite capable: http://www.acdsee.com/ Some Commercial Bitmap Type Image Or Photo Editing Software Photoshop From Adobe, version CS5, ($699.00 retail, $660.00 street). CS5 Extended ($999.00 retail, $980.00 street). Best bitmap or photo editor in industry, standard and widely supported but costly, Photoshop Elements 8 ($99.00 retail, $65.00 street) Photoshop Elements Plus ($140.00 retail 82.00 street) very stripped down version but still pretty good. A better value for you may be the package that contains both Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8 (for video editing) for $150.00 retail, $86.60 street). http://www.adobe.com/

Photoshop CS5 Extended screenshot. Page 39

Corel Paintshop Pro New X3 version from Corel Corp. ($99.00 retail). Older X2 version can be found for $30.00 street. Used to be Jasc Paint Pro and is highly regarded as a capable software and a good value: http://www.corel.com/ Serif Photo Plus From Serif ($89.00 retail, for new X4 version). New version is vastly improved. It has 16 bit per channel image support, interface improvements, speed improvements due to multi-core processor support, 5x faster undo, customizable keys, and numerous other changes. Like the other software from Serif a good value and very capable: http://www.serif.com/ Some Free 2D CAD Software DoubleCAD XT Version 2, from IMSI Soft (the makers of TurboCAD). Free and there is a pro version (Still 2D) that you have to buy for $695 retail but from what I've heard the free version is no slouch. http://www.doublecad.com/

Double CAD XT 2 screenshot. A9CAD From A9Tech which is also a very capable 2D CAD software. http://www.a9tech.com/ Solid Edge 2D From Siemens. In Solid Edge just like in TurboCAD from IMSI the 2D version is free (in IMSI the free one is called DoubleCAD XT). The Solid Edge 3D CAD software (commercial) is a very capable high end 3D CAD software too that I mentioned already. http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/free2d/

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Solid Edge free 2D CAD screenshot. FelixCAD LT From Graebert. "Free for first 1 million users" but it has been like that for quite a while already. On the page that appears click on the CAD Solutions link and then on that page click on the Desktop Cad Solutions picture, the link for FelixCAD LT is in that page. http://www.graebert.com/ So why are some CAD companies giving excellent quality 2D CAD software that used to cost thousands of dollars for free? Because there is still a lot of people and companies doing 2D CAD and many of those are also still using AutoCAD which is a very wide industry standard software. Giving these software for free they hope to motivate 2D CAD users and people doing drawing table manual drafting into their software so when they move to 3D software eventually they buy their 3D software which is where they are doing good business and they also hope to lure people away from AutoCAD and then eventually to their 3D software, it's a good move, the industry is moving more and more every day toward 3D CAD and rapid prototyping* (rapid prototyping is a way to manufacture 3D test parts very quickly and even some final production parts in some instances using very sophisticated equipment such as 3D printers* [look in glossary], CNC machines* [look in glossary] and other similar equipment) and this in turn requires 3D CAD, good for you then, some of that software above is very powerful for the stage of illustration of your flattened patterns after being unfolded by another software like Blender or any other 3D modeling program and unfolder combo or it can be used for manual surface development like it's described in the book that I mentioned before, the basic idea here being to provide a free alternative to something like CorelDraw or Illustrator, another free alternative to Inkscape or the alternative of learning 2D CAD in the process for those interested. Creating PDFs With CutePDF Writer You can also create a PDF file by printing from Pepakura (Viewer or Designer) by using the free software CutePDF Writer which is a virtual printer driver* (a virtual printer driver is sort of a fake printer because it doesn't have a real printer in the physical form, it is just a software printer that writes only files) and it creates PDFs from any application that prints. You select this virtual printer driver like it was any other printer and then it asks you for a directory where to put the PDF file and a name for it and then it "prints" you a PDF file. You can create either a vector PDF, a bitmap PDF or a mixed vector or bitmap PDF from Pepakura Page 41

(the last one occurs when you print in vectors and you have bitmap textures anyway in your Pepakura model) by using the Print Setting... options in the Setting menu. You can get the CutePDF Writer free here: http://www.cutepdf.com/ There is a more powerful CutePDF Writer commercial version but the free version is good for most anything that you want to do. For the CutePDF Writer to work you have to install the Ghostscript library first but that is also free and available right there in the CutePDF Writer web site and they both have automatic Windows installers. Despite this, remember that many modern software programs already include the ability to save to PDF format and if your software does include such a capability it is usually best to use that built-in function instead of a virtual printer program cause the results are usually of higher quality and you usually have better control of the settings for saving in PDF format but it is an alternative for those programs that do not provide such a feature yet. Unfolding Paper Models With Sheet Metal Unfolders The Solid Works software allows you to unfold your 3D models and I heard that the results are pretty good. This function is normally used for unfolding sheet metal parts but some people have adapted this to designing paper models and for other things like clothing, but this is a high end option just like it would be to buy 3D Studio Max and Pepakura or AutoCAD and Ultimate Papercraft 3D and similar options cause those programs (3D Studio, AutoCAD and SolidWorks) cost several thousand dollars but in the CAD sector there are more affordable alternatives like IMSI TurboCAD and the Pro versions 15 and 16 of TurboCAD have unfolding tools but I'm pretty sure that you need the Mechanical Tools Add-On for that or the Pro Platinum version. For version 17 you need the Pro Platinum version which includes the features of the Mechanical and Architectural add-ons and you can upgrade the Pro version to the Pro Platinum version to have those tools (which include Unbend and Unfold), again this is designed for sheet metal but that may be useful for paper modeling because the IMSI people state that it's also used for fabrics.

SolidWorks Screenshot. Page 42

Many 3D CAD software today include the option of unfolding for sheet metal fabrication or have the option of adding this via an add-on or a plugin and there are people using this functionality for paper model unfolding but I don't know what is the degree of success that they are obtaining in this respect. An additional feature of sheet metal unfolders is that they can compensate for the material thickness which is something that the Blender Unfold script can't do yet. The one included with Solid Works is pretty good and it does compensate for the material thickness though I don't know if it is precise enough to compensate for a material as relatively thin as cardstock but it's likely because of the high level of precision of CAD programs. I can't guarantee that a sheet metal unfolder will work in your particular case for the purpose of creating paper models because I haven't been able to test one for such a purpose but I heard that people are using some of them for that purpose with good results, it's up to you then to find out more about this by searching in the web and maybe by asking in user forums of the specific software, paper model forums or by contacting the particular software company and asking them if they know anything about such an use for their unfolding functions. Remember that if that option doesn't work there is still the option of buying a program like Pepakura or Ultimate Papercraft 3D and exporting your 3D models to them for unfolding, they are not free but compared to paying several thousand dollars for some top notch CAD or 3D modeling package it's a small amount of additional money that you will have to pay for the capability. One caveat here is that you have to be sure that your particular 3D program can export in a tridimensional format that Pepakura or the like can import but most mayor 3D programs have the ability to export in some of the most popular formats such as AutoCAD's DXF that programs like Pepakura or Ultimate Papercraft 3D can read, you just have to be sure that your particular combination works well and there are many combinations possible so look around and experiment. There is also the option of many programs having a demo that you can try before you buy it so you may know if the particular software that you are interested in can do all this so consider that alternative and do research on the web before making such a heavy investment. This unfolding function have other uses besides sheet metal fabrication such as creating plastic architectural lamps and other things. Have you seen those beautiful fancy lamps made from thin translucent plastic sheets that are then cut and sort of woven together to form something that looks like some sort of semi-abstract flower? those of contemporary design that appear a lot in home and architectural magazines? Well this is another use of some of those CAD unfolding plugins but there are others but like I said, many people are using this to create paper model designs. They just load the resulting pattern in an illustration software like CorelDraw afterward and then add the gluing tabs and/or tweak their designs right there in the illustration program and then save it to PDF or to another format. Another possibility that I haven't explored could be to import the flattened patterns into a 2D CAD drafting program of your choice and use them for the same purpose that I use CorelDraw X3, for the final arrangement. 2D CAD drafting programs are usually a lot less expensive than 3D CAD programs and as I have shown you already there are some free highly capable ones available in the web but I haven't tried them yet for the purpose of creating the final patterns so I don't know how good or how easy they are for this purpose, the learning curve for CAD programs is usually longer than for illustration software but if you already know one you may know if it's well suited for this purpose. Now, if you use a full 3D CAD program for designing your paper models you may even use its built in 2D drafting functions to draw the final patterns and then publish them to PDF which is something that most if not all serious CAD programs do today, so you might be able to do everything in one single program depending on how capable that 3D CAD program is. Page 43

A Possible Alternative, A More Economic Option

It is possible that you might be able to buy a legitimate copy of some of these software for far less money on Ebay http://www.ebay.com but you have to be careful and know what you are doing. I've seen TurboCAD, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or CorelDraw at a far lower price than what you normally pay in other places but you have to be careful that at least you do not get the academic version because the license is too restrictive so you need the full version, again not academic or student version, also that you get your computer version (PC or Mac), that it is not an upgrade version (that's for people that already have an older version of that particular software), that you get a real one and not a copy so check the particular vendor return policy and their rating as a vendor, that it can be registered and that you get the version number that you want so read the ads carefully. Be careful with some deceiving ads that say full version but when you read carefully you see that somewhere it says student or academic, this is not really the full version of the software this means that the software can be fully functional but its license is still restricted and you won't be able to use it commercially if you decide to use it for any profitable purpose, I do not recommend this. It's better to have a full license that you can use to do with your designs whatever you want. If you are not sure drop the vendor an e-mail and ask specifically if it is a real full commercial license. Many times you find that what you get on Ebay is an older version but sometimes that is just what you need because the price drops a lot cause of that. For example CorelDraw is in the X5 version now but I have version X3 and is more than good enough for serious illustration work and paper modeling work and it's a very stable software unlike much older versions of it that I had before. The last version I had before X3 was version 7 on Windows 98 and it crashed a lot, and Win98 crashed a lot too, but CorelDraw X3 on Windows XP or Vista that I use now is a completely different story and a very stable piece of software (I have Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit and it installs and runs without problems in it). As for TurboCAD it is now on version 17 and you just need version 15 Pro (with the Mechanical addon) at least for the unfolding functions. With a bit of experience in Ebay you can learn how to shop so it might be an alternative for some of you out there. As for 3D Studio Max or AutoCAD, it's very hard to find them on Ebay but I've seen Lightwave and other good quality 3D software in it again for far less money sometimes than in other places so you might get a good deal with some of those. I have to say about Adobe software that if you plan to buy at least a couple or more of their main programs such as Photoshop CS5 and Illustrator CS5 you may be better off buying one of their Creative Suites instead because they include a lot of additional programs (such as Flash Pro CS5 and Page 44

Dreamweaver CS5 and others in addition to the other two) and for about the same price in some instances I've seen some of those suites in Ebay (really full commercial license versions) list at about the same price of two programs like those I have just mentioned. A couple of those programs can cost you easily above $600.00 street (in Ebay but sometimes in other places too) and I've seen a few of their smaller suites for slightly more than that so I think that many times you can get a much greater deal by buying one of their suites on Ebay instead or in some other places but be careful where you buy and check on-line stores reviews and user feedback to see if you have a legit place that doesn't sell bogus software, the rule that if it looks too good to be true it may be does apply sometimes so just shop carefully. The Confusion Between UV Texture Unfolders And Paper Modeling/Other Unfolders Do not confuse texture unfolders which are usually called UV unfolders* (UV unfolding is the process of opening and flattening of the geometric faces or shapes of a 3D model or 3D shape as to make a pattern that serves as a guide for applying textures or artwork to its surface) like those used for 3D model texturing with other type of unfolders because UV unfolding is not the same as unfolding for sheet metal or paper model design cause UV unfolders do not maintain the correct proportions and measures of the polygonal faces of your model to compensate for the twisting of bitmap type images around irregular curved surfaces so they force the creation of a flattened pattern by sacrificing the polygonal faces proportions and measures a bit because even with a bit of stretching and shrinking in some of the faces when the created texture is wrapped back around the 3D model the texture still looks good enough and with newer UV unfolding techniques the quality of this is improving even more but this process is still different from paper model unfolding or sheet metal unfolding because the polygonal faces still get stretched, shrunken or changed out of proportions in the UV flattening process.

Screenshot of UV unfolding for the creation of textures in Autodesk's Softimage XSI 2010. This is the why of the 4th precaution I told you about that you had to have with the Unfold script and the B-Paperizer script of Blender a while ago of separating some parts of the model to simplify it before unfolding because when the Unfold and B-Paperizer scripts unfold your model they maintain the proportion and measures of the faces. The reason for that is cause this is critical for paper modeling and because of that it's much harder to create a single flattened pattern in one single piece, it is just harder when the polygonal faces of the part being flattened are too complex and this is because it's more difficult to lay the parts side by side or around each other when the proportions and measures Page 45

have to be maintained. That's why it has to be divided more or differently than when doing UV unfolding for textures, that's the main difference between UV unfolding and the Unfold/B-Paperizer scripts or similar unfold functions in 3D programs, that when doing UV unfolding the polygonal face proportions and measures can be changed a bit and that allows for an easier creation of a flattened pattern to be used as a template for painting or creating a texture. The Unfold/B-Paperizer scripts do not change the polygonal faces proportions or measures one bit, not even one bit, cause they can't afford to do that or your paper model parts will not fit with each other at all when assembling them. Despite that, it doesn't mean that UV unfolding doesn't require some divisions too, it does, because even by changing the polygonal faces proportions a bit that's still not enough in many cases to create a good enough flat pattern, specially in more and more complex modern video games 3D models, in many cases it can but in some instances it would be very distorted so texture creators use a feature available in most unfolders (it's available for both types, for UV texture unfolders and for paper/sheet metal unfolders) which is the use of seams* (seams are specially marked edges that are used by unfolders of different kinds for the purpose of allowing the designer to have much better control of where the 3D model is opened or cut for unfolding). This is also because it's a convenience and even in some cases where it doesn't require the use of seams it can be easier to use them so unfolders provide modelers with seams. So unfolders allows the texture creator to specify or mark some seams (some edges), I mean to designate some edges as seams that allows the the unfolder to create a better pattern with less distortion (in the case of paper/sheet metal unfolders with no distortion at all) so that in UV texture unfolders the textures can fit better in the 3D model without too much distortion or problems or to make it work at all, as for paper/sheet metal unfolders, the ability to mark cutting seams allow the designer to flatten the pattern without excessive hassles (you will see more of that later on).

Blender version 2.49b screenshot with the Unfold script for paper model design in action (running on right side of screen with the two rows of light orange and light green buttons). So you see that UV unfolding is a different function than the unfolding that you can do with the Unfold/B-Paperizer scripts in Blender 3D or the unfolding functions in other 3D programs (Blender has both functions already, UV unfolding and paper model unfolding) and UV unfolding doesn't work for paper model design because your parts will come out very distorted. The Unfold and B-Paperizer scripts will unfold the parts while maintaining the correct part proportions and then allow you to save a Page 46

SVG file with the flattened design that you can load in a vector or bitmap editor for final editing. Models that are finalized in vector or bitmap editors (preferably vector editors like Illustrator or Inkscape) are usually of higher quality than those generated by software programs such as Pepakura and one of the reasons for this is that Pepakura textures are limited to 1024 x 1024 pixel size at the moment, now, Ultimate Paperkraft 3D allows textures of sizes up to 4096 x 4096 in its first version. Another reason for this is that outside of Pepakura you can add vector texture artwork instead of bitmap type artwork but for this is better to print your Pepakura patterns as PDF files with something like CutePDF writer but while using a special setting in Pepakura that allows you to do this in vectors. In Pepakura Viewer you can go to the Setting menu and select Print Setting... and in the dialog box that appears you select the very first item called: Print lines clearly (Vector print) and together with CutePDF Writer it will create a PDF with your flattened pattern still in vectors. Pepakura also allows you to export to Windows Bitmap format, Windows Emf (Enhanced Metafile) and Eps (Encapsulated Postscript). The last two vector formats do not include textures, just the lines. So you know, there are people that take a flattened Pepakura design and load it in a program like Illustrator for further editing and they can end with a better quality model than just creating the part sheets from Pepakura alone because of their custom artwork and fine tuning of the lines, textures and other things in the patterns but only do this if your expertise with vector and/or bitmap editors allow you to create a better design and you wish to do so, or if this is your preferred method or workflow (there is a bit more about this near the end of this book at Conclusion). The difference in these two similar processes (UV texture unfolding and the other types of unfolding) is something that confuses many new paper model designers because of the similar name that UV unfolding and parts unfolding have and because the similarity of the two processes. Like I said these are two different processes and most 3D modeling applications come with an UV unfolder of one type or another but not all 3D applications have the ability to do natively (as they are out of the box) the other type of special unfolding that you need for paper model design or sheet metal or fabric unfolding, most of them can do it with the use of a plugin or special script as in the case of Blender which fortunately already includes (and of course it also has the option of using B-Paperizer which you install separately). The Unfold script in Blender also allows the creation of UV coordinates for the pattern that it itself created, so you can get into the Blender UV editor and use it to help you create textures for your models in the regular texture creation fashion of 3D models and Blender offers many features along this line but this is a separate additional thing and before that you have to make sure that your flattened paper model parts are arranged neatly which is not always easy to do with the Unfold script particularly when the unfolded parts are a bit complex but many times it can be done. If you do want to go that route I suggest that you learn more than anybody how to break your model up properly as in some examples that I give because that would be better for the creation of textures to be put back on the 3D model that you created and unfolded using the Unfold script. You load the flattened SVG pattern in a graphic editor of your choice and then import the texture that you generated in Blender and align it with your pattern (in bitmap editors that can be through the use of layers). The B-Paperizer script saves the textured and unfolded SVG pattern if the 3D model has UV textures so if you open the generated SVG file in Inkscape for example it will have the textures that you assigned through UV already in the SVG file and remember that you can always texturize the model outside Blender with an illustration program as I do with CorelDraw X3 or with any other graphic program of your choice. What I do is that I just use the SVG pattern created by the Blender unfolding scripts and load it in CorelDraw X3 and manually rearrange the parts like I explained before if I have to and texture things completely in vectors in CorelDraw because of the advantages of vector texturing or coloring but this is up to you. If the saved SVG pattern doesn't work too well another option in Blender is to have a top Page 47

view of it and export it to a DXF file format that CorelDraw and other programs can open. When I use this feature I export it to an AutoCAD DXF file format and open it in CorelDraw for tracing over it or for correction using the Dynamic Guides as a helper for both rearrangement and tracing over it if necessary because the Dynamic Guides makes it very easy to do this in many occasions. Unfortunately I was trying the demos of CorelDrawX4 and I found that if you try to open the SVG file created by the Unfold script or import the SVG file it crashes which doesn't happen with CorelDraw X3, I did find a workaround which was to use the Inkscape software. What I do is that I open the pattern in Inkscape and then save it from there to PDF format and that PDF file opens just fine in CorelDraw X4. In the CorelDraw X5 demo the SVG pattern generated by the Unfold script also opened just fine. In addition to this the Unfold script creates dashed lines for the fold lines and if you just open the pattern just like that in CorelDraw X3 or X5 it opens fine but it looses the dashed fold lines, they appear solid and thicker, this is no big a deal but if you do the same trick of opening the file in Inkscape and saving it as a PDF when you open the PDF in CorelDraw X3, X4 and X5 it preserves better the dashed lines because Inkscape opens the dashed lines just fine and it saves them well in the PDF format. Now, sometimes in Inkscape I had to adjust the pattern size, I had to adjust the paper size to a larger size like letter size and enlarge the generated pattern (while constraining proportions with the Ctrl key) to better fill the page cause sometimes it opened very tiny. I had to do this in Inkscape before saving it to PDF cause if I didn't it appeared all screwed up in CorelDraw but after the adjustment the PDF opened beautifully in it. So check the page size in Inkscape in File menu Document Properties to be sure that the imported SVG doesn't have a very tiny size that will give problems when saving to PDF or to other formats. B-Paperizer doesn't mark the fold lines as dashed lines but the SVG file that it generates opens just fine in CorelDraw X3, X4 and X5. I tried the SVG files generated by both scripts in Illustrator CS4 too and they both opened just fine but just like with CorelDraw X3 the SVG file generated by the Unfold script looses the dashed lines and you can use the same Inkscape to PDF trick to open it in Illustrator with the dashed lines better preserved. In DoubleCAD XT I couldn't import any SVG or PDF format files cause it doesn't have that capability but I saved the unfolded pattern as an AutoCAD DXF file from Blender (from the patterns generated by either script) and it opened fine in it except that it didn't have the dashed fold lines, only solid lines but you can work with that. In a similar way Solid Edge 2D does not open PDF or SVG files. At first I couldn't even open any AutoCAD files in it but then I figured out that you have to run a configuration wizard before opening AutoCAD files. You access this wizard through the Options... button that is available in the Open File dialog box which is accessed in turn through the round icon at the top left of the program interface or by using Ctrl+O. The button is grayed out until you select an AutoCAD file. You then run the wizard to tell Solid Edge how do you want it to translate your AutoCAD files to Solid Edge and then you can save this configuration (you can save different ones if you want to). After doing this process it will open the files just fine. I did hear about an exception about UV unfolders that is supposed to allow them to be used for paper model unfolding which is called 1:1 UV unfolding. What I heard is that a 1:1 or 1 to 1 UV unfolder as people call it is a special mode that allows a UV unfolder to maintain the proportions and sizes of the polygonal faces in a similar way to a paper model or sheet metal unfolder but I tried to find more information about this in the web and I couldn't so this is unconfirmed from my part cause I haven't been able to test this at all and I don't know which UV unfolder if any is capable of doing this. I merely mention this here as a reference in case the paper model designer finds more information about this in the future on his/her own so then the designer will know what it is about but unfortunately, like I said, at the moment of writing this I haven't had the time to investigate this further and find more information about it but fortunately I do provide in this book a lot of alternatives for creating 3D paper Page 48

models anyway. B-Paperizer Script Installation B-Paperizer doesn't come installed with Blender as the other script but I included a copy of the latest version with this book which is compatible with Blender 3D up to version 2.49b. You can also download the script from Czestmyr's web site: http://czestmyr.wz.cz/ And this is the direct link to the script page: http://czestmyr.wz.cz/2_Programming/4_Python/1_B_paperizer/b_paperizer_en.html In that page right mouse click where it says here in white letters and select Save Link As... and save the script to a folder of your choice. You have to install it manually but this is not difficult at all, all that you have to do is to unzip it if it's compressed (it's a single file) and you will obtain a file that ends in the extension .py which is a Python script, find where the Blender scripts directory is and copy it there. If you download it from Czestmyr web page it's not zipped. The Blender scripts directory or folder is located in different places depending on the Blender version, if Blender is the version with installer or not, what choice you made during installation and what operating system you are using. In Windows if you have a Blender version 2.45 or lower with an automatic installer it defaults to the second installation location for Blender user data files as you can see in the following Blender 2.45 installer screenshot:

If you use that setting you will find the scripts in the Program Files directory in Windows 2000, Windows XP Home, XP Pro 32 bits, Vista 32 bits or Windows 7 32 bits and in my case it is in the C:\ drive which is the most common location for most people's main hard drives but it can be another letter depending on your installation of course so if that's the case substitute the C:\ letter for your drive letter. More exactly it will be here: Page 49

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts If you use Windows XP 64 bit, Vista 64 bit or Windows 7 64 bit version but you used a 32 bit Blender (the 64 bit version doesn't have an automatic installer yet) and you selected the second (the middle) installation location for the user data files the scripts folder will be here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts In Windows if you have Blender version 2.46 or above with an automatic installer it will default to the upper installation location item for Blender user data files as you can see in this Blender for Windows 2.46 installer screenshot:

If you use Windows 2000, Windows XP Home and XP Pro and your Blender comes with an automatic Windows installer and you selected the upper installation location the scripts folder will be here: C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Account Name\Application Data\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts If you use Windows Vista 32 and 64 bit or Windows 7 32 or 64 bit and you install a 32 bit Blender (again the 64 bit version doesn't have an automatic installer yet) with an automatic installer and you select the upper installation location the scripts folder will be here: C:\Users\Your User Account Name\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts For the 64 bit version of Blender it doesn't have an installer at the moment of writing this book like I already said so it is installed in a directory of your choice in a location similar to the one I will give after the next paragraph so read what I say in it. If you use a Blender version without an automatic installer that comes packed as a zip file it will be Page 50

in the directory where you installed Blender which in my case in my other Windows XP machine is a directory called blender-2.49b-windows (a directory that was created when I unzipped the Blender zipped file but it could have another name of course depending on what version of Blender you have or if you renamed the folder) and I put this folder inside a directory that I created which I called StandAloneSoftware and StandAloneSoftware is in my case a directory of my creation where I put all programs that do not have installers and that run usually by double clicking in the .exe file (I make shortcuts to those programs and I place them in an application launcher program but I could also put such shortcuts in the desktop and/or other places if I wanted to) so in my particular case that folder path would be: C:\StandAloneSoftware\blender-2.49b-windows\.blender\scripts\ Remember that StandAloneSoftware folder is a personal creation of mine and it could be anything for you depending on where you installed your Blender and the Blender folder name could be the default that was created when you unzipped the file (usually named by the person that created the zip file) or any name that you gave that folder if you renamed it. In Linux it normally is: /usr/lib/blender/scripts It could be in different places depending on what version of Linux or Blender you have so I suggest that if you do not know where your Blender scripts directory is you consult a forum for your Linux version in particular or a Blender forum and ask where is the correct location of the Blender scripts folder. As for Macintosh users I suggest that they do the same as Linux users and ask in Blender forums where is the particular location for your scripts for your operating system but don't worry this is usually very easy to find but in Linux and Macintosh the folder can be hidden so you may have to allow the viewing of hidden files first to be able to find the folder. There are tutorials on the web that say how to allow viewing of the hidden folders and tutorials on how to install a Blender script on a Mac. You can do a web search for something like Blender scripts folder location Mac or Macintosh or something similar and you may find your answer. After placing it in the correct directory either restart Blender or update the Scripts menu. To do so one has to take any Blender window and click on that icon in the lower left corner and select the Window Type and in this case it would be the Scripts Window and it's represented by a serpent icon (it symbolizes the Python programing language). To update the Scripts menu all that you have to do is to click the Scripts menu right there in the Scripts Window and scroll the cursor to the top of the list and select Update Menus and any new script that you put in the Blender scripts directory will appear in the menu system if it was designed to load automatically because there are some scripts that need to be run manually from the text editor but the B-Paperizer script does appear in the Blender Scripts menu system automatically. You can find it by clicking the Scripts menu in the Scripts Window then selecting Misc and finally selecting B-Paperizer. If for some reason you cannot find the Blender scripts folder, try using the file search function of your operating system for 3ds_export.py, this file should be located in the folder we're looking for. The Blender Unfolding Scripts Controls One advantage of the the Unfold script is that it already comes pre-installed with Blender so you Page 51

can use it right away. The following is a screenshot of the Blender Unfold script when activated. Notice that I have the Blender workspace divided in several windows and for those that do not know and plan to learn Blender, any other 3D modeling program or learn a CAD program, the Blender workspace is customizable and can be divided in many different ways and the viewports* (a viewport is a window in a 3D modeling or a 2D or 3D CAD program through which you see, create and edit your design) in many 3D modeling and CAD programs can usually be configured similarly in many different ways. I left at least one window for the Scripts Window and one as a 3D View to see my model or part and also to view the patterns as I unfold them. After getting the Scripts Window to show, you click on the Scripts menu and then you select Mesh and there you will select Unfold which will show you the Unfold script buttons:

Blender Unfold script screenshot. I will explain to you at least the most important buttons that you are most likely to use in the Unfold script. The most important button is the Unfold button which is the one that generates the unfolded patterns when you click it. It generates these patterns in the first layer so if your object is in another layer and you click on the button and you don't see the generated pattern you have to click on the first layer button to see it. Sometimes you have to click the Unfold button several times so the script attempts to generate the pattern in a different way if the first attempt fails. Sometimes you have to do this a few times before you obtain a fully unfolded pattern. The second most important button is the save button which will allow you to save the generated pattern as a SVG file once you are satisfied with it. The overlaps button allows you to force the generation of the pattern at the expense of having some of the polygons overlap some others. This is kinda of inconvenient but it is still useful because if some shapes conflict and the pattern cannot be unfolded normally you can force the generation of the pattern and then this pattern can still be rearranged in an illustration or CAD program afterward. Now, to prevent that, it is usually better to learn how to separate your model in smaller parts and to learn how to cut the parts better and all this will be explained better later in the book. The uv button is for the generation of UV coordinates for texturing. The search button is the one to be careful with because what it will do is to keep searching for a possible unfolded pattern and the problem with it is that if it doesn't find one it keeps trying indefinitely and even the exit button stops working so overall I don't use it much and I always save my work before trying to use that button. You may use Ctrl+C at the console and it cancels the execution of the script forcefully but it only works sometimes and sometimes Blender just crashes so again I suggest that before attempting to use the search function you save your work. I don't know why the creator of the script didn't put a stop routine in the script with a stop button for that function, frankly I found that baffling but I contacted him some time ago and he told me that he was Page 52

working on a fix for that so I hope that he gets that working soon. Anyway I seldom use this button if ever anyway cause I know how to separate and/or cut my models or parts for the script already. This script comes from the http://celeriac.net/unfolder/ web site but like I stated already it comes pre-installed with Blender but in its home web site there are a few additional functions about it that are explained with a couple of tutorial pages that you may be interested in like the Manual guidance system for example that affects the order of unfolding of the 3D model or part. I myself have not experimented with it so far. With what I have learned I can do most anything I want to do with the combination of the Unfold and B-Paperizer scripts but you may want to try the tutorials to see if you get even better results than I did with Unfold so if you are interested click on the previous link and learn more about it.

Blender B-Paperizer screenshot. The B-Paperizer script is the alternate Blender unfolding script and again in this script the most important button is of course the Unfold button which will create your flattened pattern but in this script I found that it has to be pressed more than once sometimes for it to work properly and I'm not sure why but that gets the script to work just fine. If after pressing the button all you get is always a single triangle you have to be sure that you followed the precautions that I told you about before when using these two scripts in this same chapter in the section titled: A Few Important Basic Precautions When Unfolding With Blender and sometimes even after doing all that you have to press it more than once like I said. This script doesn't produce the unfolded pattern in the first layer like the Unfold script does, it creates the pattern right there in the layer in which you have your 3D model or 3D part which I think is better. Equal to the Unfold script save button functionality and also the second most important button is the SVG Export button which will save your unfolded pattern to a SVG file. The Mirror button creates a mirrored image of your pattern when you toggle it on and then press the Unfold button. The Create borders button creates an outline of the size specified in the parameters that are located at the left side of it so for example if you select US Letter Portrait in the first drop box button located immediately to left of the Create borders button it will create and outline of 11 x 8.5 which is standard letter size and the idea of this is to arrange all your unfolded parts right there inside of Blender before exporting the pattern to SVG and I personally do not use it cause I prefer to arrange all my patterns in CorelDraw but I think some people may find it useful and it is nice that it's available as an option, it was a nice courtesy from the script writer. The two parameter boxes right below this drop box button allow you to specify custom sizes for your border. The Zoom slider allow you to enlarge or reduce the size of the created border so if you put it at 200% for example and you hit the Page 53

Create borders button it will create your selected size page but at twice the size. The two buttons to the left of the script interface (above the Mirror and Unfold buttons) are the Face gener. (face generation) button and the Edge gener. (edge generation) button. The B-Paperizer script can generate two patterns depending on those two buttons being toggled on (they are both on when their color is darker which is their default setting). The upper button (Edge gener.) when is toggled on makes the script generate the normal flattened pattern that includes all the filled triangular faces and the lower button (Edge gener.) makes the script generate a second pattern that is intended as an outline in case you only want to use that instead. So when do you use that instead of the filled pattern? I will explain that better ahead in the book but first I need to explain the two sliders that are just at the right side of those two buttons that we just mentioned. Don't get confused with the location of the two sliders cause they are both really related to the second button only (Edge gener.) and their value doesn't affect the solid filled triangular pattern at all, what they will influence is the outline pattern that the script generates when the Edge gener. button is toggled on. The first slider above of those two is the NET slider and it will affect what fold lines will be included or which ones will be left out based on the angle of one face against the angle of the next adjacent face. This value is the threshold angle that will determine which folds will be included in the outline pattern and which ones will be left out so that is why the value goes from 0 to 180 because this number represents degrees so if it is all the way up (180 degrees) all folds will be left out and you will have a single outline with no divisions inside whatsoever and as you move the slider more to the left the more and more fold lines will appear depending on their angle in relation to adjacent faces. You really have to experiment a little with it to get the hang of it. The second slider just below that one is the Acc slider which affects which lines of the outside edge will be included or which ones will not depending on the proximity of those lines to other lines. Sometimes some lines are really too close to one another to be of significance so the value of this slider allows you to create a threshold that allows you to discard segment lines that are too close to one another and would create sort of a double line so the slider determines which ones are to be included in the final outline and the higher the number the more lines will be included and vice versa so if you put it at the highest value (100) all lines will be included no matter how close to other lines and as you move the slider to the left and decrease its value the more outer edge lines will be discarded based as I explained before on how close a segment line is to the other. Again just like with the first slider (the NET slider) you really have to experiment with it until you get the hang of it. I will explain a little bit more about the use of the Edge gener. button in some sections ahead. I told you that later on I was going to tell you what do you use the outside line for instead of using the full solid pattern with all the triangles but for you to understand its use or to understand it fully (if you have not started to figure it out yet) you should wait until you get to some sections ahead. I am referring to the sections titled: The Most Basic Shape - The Cube in chapter 4 and particularly the section titled: Smoothing And Professional High Polygon Resolution Paper Model Creation on chapter 4 too in which I will explain the use of this function much better at the very end of the section. Of course the last button is the Exit B-Paperizer button which turns the script off and that is a basic description of what those buttons do in the Blender unfolding scripts that are available at the moment of creating this book for Blender 2.49b. A New Unfolding Script For Blender 2.5x! There is now a new unfolder script for Blender! There is a new unfolder for the New Blender 2.5x created by the same user Emu (Addam Dominec) that created the tutorial about baking* textures (texture baking generally refers to the process of recording as an image, some aspect of the material or Page 54

mesh characteristics of a model) into paper models which is described in the section titled: Some Software That Can Do The Job in chapter 2 Modern Paper Model Design (it is shortly after the Blender 2.49b screenshot with the small airplane). This script is called Export Paper Model From Blender (very simple to learn). This is a third excellent unfolder script for paper models (or any other related uses) that is created for Blender but this other script has a few differences such as being the first one that works with the new Blender 2.5x (it doesn't work with older Blenders 2.49b or below) but this is good news anyway cause that means that we have already a working paper model unfolding script for the new Blender version when is finished which is much more capable than the older Blender. Also this is the first Blender unfolding script that is able to generate the gluing tabs automatically like Pepakura! This is another first in Blender. An interesting thing is that this other talented programmer is also from the Czech republic just like the creator of the B-Paperizer script Czestmyr. The script already works but you need the new Blender 2.53 beta release that you can get at the official Blender site. This is the direct link to the Blender 2.53 download page: http://www.blender.org/download/get-25-alpha/ Don't worry about the alpha word in the hyperlink, the link is for the beta version. You can find the script in this place: http://github.com/addam/Export-Paper-Model-from-Blender Do not try to save the script by clicking on the text that says export_paper_model.py cause the formatting of the text in that is wrong or by cutting and pasting the text after clicking that cause when you save it as a .py like that (as doing it with Windows Notepad) it will change the formatting of the indentations of the text and the script won't work in the new Blender. Click on the button at the top on that page to the right that says Download Source and choose between the ZIP or TAR file for Windows, Mac or Linux. Unzip that file and then you can install it in Blender 2.53. In Blender 2.5x you don't have to look for the correct script directory as in Blender 2.49b, you just go to the File menu and click on User Preferences... or use Ctrl+Alt+U and in the dialog box that appears you click on the tab called Add-Ons and then you click on the button at the bottom of that dialog box called Install Add-On. A file selection window will open and you have to look for the folder in which you placed the unzipped file and then click on the file. Once you have selected the file you have to click on the button at the top left of the dialog box that is labeled Install Add-On. After you have installed it you have to make sure that the add-on checkbox to the right is selected for that particular add-on that you have just installed and that will enable the script. Once the checkbox is selected you must save the user preferences cause if you don't when Blender 2.5x starts again it will not have the add-on enabled and you will have to open the user preferences dialog box again to enable that particular add-on. To save user preferences you click on that button on the original user preferences dialog box that you opened first, it is at the bottom left and it is labeled Save As Default. Another way to save your user preferences is by using the Ctrl+U key combination as in Blender 2.49b. Now your script will be installed in the correct directory and will be ready to be used. The next picture is a screenshot of the new script's interface in Blender 2.5x. The Blender 2.5x interface has a lot of changes from Blender 2.49b and most of this book has been written around Blender 2.49b. The reason for that is very simple, when I decided to write the book there weren't any unfolding scripts for Blender 2.5x yet and I didn't know if there were going to be any for the new Page 55

Blender, I supposed that sooner or later there was going to be an update of one of those scripts for the new version but there was no way to know when that was going to happen. In many previous Blender updates many scripts just continued to work alright but for Blender 2.5x most scripts have to be rewritten cause the new version is a very radical departure from the previous ones. Knowing that the new Blender was a big milestone in the history of the program I wanted to create the book around the new Blender but the unfolding scripts were not ready and Blender 2.5x itself wasn't ready yet and I couldn't recommend the process around a program that was still alpha software and not production ready as Blender 2.49b is. That is why I made the decision to work with Blender 2.49b instead. If you want to use the new unfolding script with the new Blender be forewarned that Blender 2.53 is still in an beta stage and still not fully stable or fully operational so if you do want to use it be aware of the risks. I myself don't have that much experience with Blender 2.5x yet cause I have not used it anywhere near as much as I have used the older Blender because I really have been waiting for the final version and I am not too fond of alpha or beta software anyway but some people have started to use the new Blender as it is. This beta version has just been released and the final version could be released this same year after a few beta releases so you may use it but it is at your discretion. Now, this new version is at least way more stable than the original Alpha 0 release. I'm talking about the new script here to get things going and to help inform the public about what is coming ahead but keep in mind that the the book is written around the older Blender 2.49b and the older two scripts. Take a look at the new script's panel which appears at the left side of any 3D View viewport:

Export Paper Model From Blender script screenshot. I have barely started to use this script cause I just barely got my hands on it due to a communication that I received from its creator so I have only started to learn how to use it. I was really about to publish the new edition of the book so the information on the new script barely made it into it. To be able to see the script panel you have to be able to see the Tool Shelf of Blender 2.5x which appears at the left of any 3D View window. If you cannot see it just press the T key with the cursor Page 56

positioned over the 3D View window which toggles it on/off. If you don't see the script panel move the scroll bar to the right of the Tool Shelf panel down until you see the tile of the script (Export Paper Model). The first button above in the script's panel is the Make Unfoldable button which you press after selecting an object and it will create some seams that will define the cuts of the pattern. You can customize those cuts by getting into Edit Mode (Tab) and clicking on edges (make sure that you are in Edge select mode by pressing Ctrl+Tab+2) and select the edges that you want to use as seams, then press Ctrl+E over the 3D View window and in the menu that appears select Mark Seam or select the edges that you want without seams and press Ctrl+E and then select Clear Seam. I don't know what some of the sliders of the script do cause its creator explained to me that they are debugging buttons and they are not going to be there in the final version of the script. If you don't see these buttons-sliders in the area labeled at the top Make Unfoldable (in the Tool Shelf) is because you have to press the Make Unfoldable button above and then this other area will appear but don't worry about them cause like I said they are there for the moment as the developer works on the script. Originally the gluing tabs were generated as a single continuous line and I suggested to him that it was a better idea to make them separate shapes and he fixed the script and made the lines of the gluing tabs separate lines instead and then due to a bit more input from me he decided that it was better an idea to generate the gluing tabs as closed shapes because that would allow users of some programs like CorelDraw for example to give the shape a fill color without further editing. In Inkscape or in other illustration programs if you create an open line shape you can still give it a fill color but in CorelDraw if you do not close the shape it cannot have a fill color and it remains blank. This improvement will make the pattern easier to work with for the designers, it will save the designers time. He was quite fast, he added the first correction the very next day that I communicated to him and he did the second improvement very shortly after. Anyway you have to keep in mind that this script is new and it is still a work in progress but despite that it is already very usable. Unfortunately at the moment, contrary to the other two scripts you won't be able to preview the unfolded pattern inside of Blender so you have to export it to be able to see the resulting flattened pattern. Still it seems to do a good job. To export the pattern you press the Export Net... button and then you will be able to see the save file window in which you can see a few special settings for the pattern to the left of the window in the area labeled Export Paper Model. Right there you will see the Page size: parameters which are pretty self explanatory. If you get an error that says something like: An island is too big, etc. when saving it means that the object that you are unfolding is too big and the pattern doesn't fit in the page size that is determined there. Let's say that for example you want to unfold a standard cube, if you leave the cube size at default you will get this error cause the default cube's size is 2 meters (the new Blender can use Blender units but also the Metric and Imperial measuring systems) and that size won't fit in a standard A4 or letter size paper so you have to reduce your model (in this case the cube) a lot to get it into a size that fits and then the error will disappear. The button at the bottom of that area is the Tab Size: button which determines how wide the gluing tabs are, it determines what is their thickness from the edge of the part to the outside of the tab. This is yet another improvement that came as a suggestion that I gave the designer cause I though that many designers would prefer to adjust the width of the gluing tabs to their liking. I gave this suggestion to him simultaneously with the other idea of creating separated gluing tabs shapes and just like with the other modification he also had this improvement ready very quickly. The Export Paper Model button at the top right of that window is the button that allows you to save the unfolded pattern. Notice that by default it has a file name ending in .blend in the file name input box. If you leave it as that it will save it with that name but it will add the .svg extension to that and it will be an SVG file anyway. So if your work is called Cube.blend for example it will save it as Cube.blend_page.svg so you may give it a more proper name if you want to before clicking the Export Paper Model button.

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The next screenshot is from the window that you will see when you press Export Net... button which includes the additional script's functions on the panel at the lower left of the screen:

The Blender 2.5x Save File window with the Export Paper Model script parameters at the left side. And those are the most important buttons in the script and the ones I understand how to use so far and I hope that it gives a head start to those that want to do paper unfolding with the current version of the new Blender.

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Chapter 3 - The Methodology Of 3D Paper Model Creation

aper models are usually designed with a philosophy similar to the way 3D video game characters and objects are designed because you may want to simplify your model with a lower polygonal count (less faces of the geometry or model) so it's easier to flatten the parts later (remember that this is not always the case, some paper models particularly the very high quality ones are fairly complex and with a high number of polygons in their design) anyway I warn you here that this low polygon stuff is just precisely an option and it's not necessary equal to the low polygon way in which 3D game models are designed (or were designed a short time ago cause they are becoming very highly polygonal and detailed nowadays), it's just somewhat similar and that depends on the complexity of the model that you want to design, it's merely a rough comparison that should not be followed so literally. One example of following this low poly concept too literally is a car that is designed with a low polygon count because it's a relatively simple model but you look at the car wheels and because they are designed with this low polygon mentality just like the rest of the car, then the wheels look octagonal or something similar.

Car octagonal wheel compared to a simple to do cylinder. What happens is that sometimes 3D programs have what is called a polygon reduction tool which takes a model designed with a higher number of polygons and then reduce them to a minimum without affecting the overall shape of the 3D model. This tool allows you to design a higher quality model together with a lower quality one without having to build both of them from scratch. It has limitations and often it's better just to build two versions from scratch but many times it produces acceptable results if you know how to use it. Now, in general it's better that if you are going to design a low poly model for a 3D game or for paper modeling you design it as a low poly model from the get go, this produces far better results and it's usually the choice of pros but in the case of paper modeling it doesn't have to follow the exact same low poly 3D game mentality and later in the book I'll show you a lot more things about this. This octagonal wheel may have come from the use of such a poly reducer tool or not if the designer did this on purpose by hand but it looks awful and it's a bit shortsighted from he or she because the designer could have modified the wheel by hand (well not completely by hand, I mean in a vector software like Inkscape or right there in the 3D program) and all that the designer had to do for a simple wheel (and I mean for the shape of the wheel not the textures) was to draw 2 perfect circles (The Page 59

front and back parts of the wheel and tire) and the cylinder walls (the tire tread) which is nothing but a long rectangle and to obtain the length of the rectangle all you need is a simple perimeter of the circle formula which is the most basic of geometry math (P = 2 x x R - where P is the perimeter, is 3.14159 and R is the radius of the circle) the perimeter of your circle is the length of your rectangle, you see?, and that formula is very easy to use). There are on-line calculators that determine perimeter on the Internet and you just have to input the radius or in some cases use it backwards which means inputting the perimeter and getting the circle radius and anyway even if you don't know how to use that you can estimate it and obtain the right length by a bit of trial and error and the width of your rectangle is how wide you want your tire, a very simple measure that you determine by your preference and with this you obtain a perfectly round cylinder instead of an octagonal or ten sided box or the like and it doesn't require rocket science to do it, just a bit of common sense (this is for a simple wheel, there are much more elaborate wheels in advanced models). That's what I mean by not following the low polygon technique so literally.

High poly 3D model on the left, medium poly at center and low poly model on the right (medium and low poly are also showing wireframes). A poly reduction tool could have been used for some models but for these, three different models were created. I've seen paper models pulled out of game models precisely and this requires a conversion of the game engine format 3D model to your 3D software of choice (like the .md3 format of the Quake games or similar) and that usually requires a plugin, an utility of some type or a function of import built right there in your 3D software because these game models can be easier to convert to paper models cause of their low polygon count (at least before polygon count in 3D games goes completely to stratospheric heights in the near future well that's sort of happening right now so you may use a polygon reducer tool but models from older 3D games are easier to convert) and cause the textures are already painted, yes I've seen this done well and bad. I've seen models done in this fashion very neatly and I've seen a few very bad conversions done in this fashion. Simple common sense must be used to do this right instead of translating everything so literally but like I said there is also more to know about this and I will explain further ahead. The MilkShape software it's an inexpensive alternative in 3D modeling that some paper modelers use for the modeling part of the process (then they use Pepakura in combination with it for the unfolding process) and one of the reasons some modelers use MilkShape is because its extensive support for 3D game formats, it can export and import a whole lot of different game model formats so Page 60

paper modelers can use it to convert them to Pepakura or to other 3D programs to turn them into paper model designs (or for other purposes). It's shareware and registration costs $35. You can get it here: http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/

MilkShape screenshot with an imported Max Payne model (that one in particular is too high poly res for paper modeling). There are other 3D software programs that allow importing of game model formats, for many high end 3D modeling programs there are plugins and import filters like in the case of 3D Studio Max, there are plenty of 3D game formats that can be imported and exported to and from (respectively) 3D Studio because by 3D Studio being a tool of such caliber it is used widely in the industry of video games creation and there are similar things for Maya, etc. so I'm not saying that MilkShape is the only one that has that much support for game formats, what I'm saying is that it's probably the one of the inexpensive 3D modelers that has that much support for game formats but of course the high end tools have a lot of support for this even if sometimes this is through scripts or plugins. As a rule of thumb 3D modeling programs have far more support for game formats than 3D CAD software because of the nature of the markets that they belong to and their respective capabilities so if you want more support of game formats and if you are more artistically inclined you may be better off with a 3D modeling software and if you do not care that much about game formats and are more technically inclined maybe you will be better off with a 3D CAD package but that's only a rule of thumb.

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Chapter 4 - Some Important Fundamental Principles Not Well Understood

here are some fundamental and essential principles of paper model design that I found were not well understood in general or not understood at all by some people. I isolated them and ahead in this book I will share them with you. I managed to identify what I believe is the main confusion regarding this high polygon versus low polygon issue in 3D paper model design and I realized that there seems to be a general big misunderstanding regarding this from my observation of many, many models that I downloaded from the Internet, several commercial models that I acquired, their assembly diagrams and instructions, reading many posts in different paper modeling design forums and getting involved in the paper modeling design process in general. I believe that many professional paper model designers could have learned this eventually with experience but I haven't seen anybody so far come forward and explain this well to others or at least not in a free tutorial or free book so I decided to do something about it and I will explain the subject here so you see more clearly that it's not exactly a low polygon absolute thing, a medium or a high polygon one either, it's something else sort of a hybrid of these combined in a special way and once you grasp this principle you will be able to create and design better paper models and you will understand much, much better the difference between the low polygon methodology used for 3D video game models and the correct one that should be used for paper models and understanding this is key so if you are interested in designing paper models you should read this book completely to see if you learn a thing or two about it, even if you are not going to use Blender 3D or CorelDraw/Illustrator so read on. The Most Basic Shape - The Cube The easiest shapes to handle are usually things with straight sides but they can also become quite complex but that depends on the model, the quality of the model and how elaborate the real life object is (if there is a real life object). But for the purpose of this book we do something simple now. This is a perfect cube which means that all six sides are perfectly square rectangles and this is one of the most basic of 3D paper model shapes of course:

The next illustration will be a vector graphics which means that you can actually use it to enlarge it or to reduce it without being afraid of it loosing quality so even if they are in a small size to fit in this book you could import the page where they are in an illustration or CAD software and enlarge them to a better size so they can be used as actual paper model patterns. So whenever you see an image that says vector illustration underneath you will know that you can turn it into an actual model part, now, not all vector illustrations in this book are paper model patterns and keep in mind that I didn't build Page 62

prototypes with many of them cause they are mainly for illustration purposes so one of them could need a bit of adjustment but most of them (if not all of them) will assemble as paper model parts alright. These illustrations were done in Open Office Draw or in CorelDraw X3 and then imported into Open Office Draw (and in this process one or two lost a tiny bit of precision) but most of the time you will not even notice unless you zoom in really close in some parts. After being imported into Open Office Draw they were placed into Open Office Write which was used to create this book. If you unfold a regular cube like that one in the previous picture in a 3D software with unfolding functions, you will obtain this:

Vector illustration You don't even need to unfold this in a 3D program of course, in an illustration program you just create a perfect square and copy it six times and arrange it like this but if you use a 3D program with an unfolding function that is what you will usually obtain. In this case I used Blender and the Unfold script and that's the pattern that I got because for a simple thing like a cube it's what you will get. If I use the B-Paperizer script instead I have to divide the cube first in triangles by first selecting everything with the A key and then using the Ctrl+T key combination and see the result of that:

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The next thing that I have to do for the B-Paperizer script is to select only those edges that are going to indicate where the cut lines will be (I changed the view mode to wireframe and the selection to edges instead of vertexes or faces through Edge select mode - Ctrl+Tab+2) and the selected edges are shown here in yellow except for the last one which is in white due to it being highlighted for being the active selected segment (the last selected segment):

After unfolding this is the pattern that I got:

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As you can see it's basically the same pattern but with the added triangles (the grayed out triangle is just the active selected face, the last selected face). If you are concerned that you do not want the triangles you could ignore them in your graphic application and delete them and for simple figures it's even possible to delete those edges that divide the quads right there in Blender before exporting but as the geometry becomes more complex you just trace over this pattern in an illustration program and ignore the triangles and you may ignore much more as I will show you later on in other chapters. You have to be careful because you can only delete those triangle lines for quads that are perfectly flat but I will explain this better ahead. There is however another way to deal with this and that is to use the Edge gener. button of the B-Paperizer script of Blender with the NET slider set to 179 degrees, and why 179 degrees? Because that means that any quad that is truly flat will be shown as a whole quad instead of two triangles because quads that are truly flat have two triangles at 180 degrees to each other, that's what 180 degrees is, completely open or flat, isn't it? Another alternative is of course to use the Unfold script so that's up to you but with this trick you can mimic to a large degree the ability of the Unfold script to produce a pattern without triangles which is good news for people that use bitmap editors afterward instead of vector illustration programs. In this case the 179 degrees trick works fine cause the cube have quads that are truly flat and it will work fine for any quad that is truly flat. This trick may not always work, in some more elaborate and much more polygonal objects (this will be dealt with later-on in the book) it may not do such a good job but you can always take the flattened pattern, select the inner edges carefully by hitting the B key twice and you can then use the circular selection of Blender (you can change the size of the selection circle by scrolling the mouse wheel) and then after selecting all the inner edges you can press the Delete key and in the small menu that appear select Edges to delete those inner edges right there in Blender and leave the outer edge only. This could also help people that will work with the patterns in bitmap editing programs. After I flattened the pattern I exported it as a SVG file and then imported the SVG file pattern into my illustration program (CorelDraw X3) and added the gluing tabs there, then I colored it, of course you can see here that if I used the B-Paperizer script instead of the Unfold script I had to either delete the segments that form the triangles or use the aforementioned Edge gener. button trick:

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Vector illustration. As you can see I colored it and added the gluing tabs. I also colored the gluing tabs in a lighter color to make them easier to identify and added some small circles in them for the same purpose. The pattern up there is in vector format so you can use it and enlarge it or shrink it if you want to. From this point forward (with a few exceptions) we will use mostly the Unfold script for simplicity purposes until we get into some more advanced methods much later on. If you use the Unfold script and you run into too much trouble like faces not flattening completely, or the script not being able to unfold large amount of polygons or things running out of proportions or something try the B-Paperizer script instead but keep in mind always that many times the trouble doesn't come from either of these two scripts but from forgetting to apply the precautions that I warned you about earlier. Remember the numbered steps that I gave you before with several precautions that you must have when using them or the scripts won't work at all. If you want to use the B-Paperizer script instead remember that all you have to do is to imagine what I will show you but with the quads divided into triangles instead and when one traces over these patterns with a graphic program one can ignore the triangles (again, only for those quads that were flat) but this is when using illustration or 2D CAD to trace over them because in the case of a bitmap editor is much more difficult to remove the unwanted lines. If you are a person that loads these patterns in a bitmap type editor (you can also call it a pixel or raster image editor) you may be better off using the Unfold script with its known limitations. There will be a few instances in which I will mention the B-Paperizer script anyway and even show a few graphics in which you will be able to see the result of the unfolding with it. Later on in more advanced procedures the B-Paperizer script will be used more cause it is more capable for some Page 66

special techniques so you may end up using it much more for some special things. Other Flat Faced Parts Look at the next figure:

This diamond like shape (it has eight sides) is no longer as easy to unfold by hand or to draw in an illustration program out of simple deduction because of the more complex sides and angles. There are drafting tricks to get it done and it is still relatively simple but the main point here is that I just bumped the difficulty up just a little bit and when the complexity starts to increase it becomes more and more difficult and time consuming to create an unfolded pattern and here is where the computer starts to shine. Here is where a computer starts to show its advantage against the old methods of paper model design and 3D figure unfolding cause an unfolding program will do this automatically and you don't have to spend that much time creating the unfolded patterns or figuring out how to draw them. It may be possible to use an illustration or 2D CAD program to create those projections that draftsmen do to get the correct measures of the polygonal faces. If you have those drafting skills or very good geometry and trigonometry skills, it would still be easier to do because the computer already offers digital advantages similar to word processing such as the ease of copying everything you do instead of having to draw everything again or copying it using a blueprint copy machine. And it's easier to delete or erase lines and draw new lines and do editing in general. In addition it's also easier to maintain precise measures so it can be done but this pales in comparison to how fast it is to use a program with 3D capabilities in combination with an unfolder function, plugin or separate unfolding software. Despite that, drafting in 2D in a computer may be an alternative for people intimidated by learning a full blown 3D modeling program or a 3D CAD package, of course that is, if you already know drafting or want to learn it by taking a drafting course that includes surface development or if you want to buy a book on the subject like the one I mentioned before or if your math, geometry and trigonometry skills are good enough but I warn you that those methods are much more time consuming than doing 3D modeling and unfolding in a computer program. Once you learn a 3D program and do the unfolding automatically you won't want to go back to doing it by hand because it consumes many, many times the amount of time and is kinda tedious in comparison, some people like doing it the old fashion way but I do not recommend this for complex and very elaborate models cause it's very tough. Observe now the pattern that the Blender Unfold script creates for the diamond like shape:

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Vector illustration. As you can see it is a doable pattern, you can add the gluing tabs and it will work but it's a bit messy so I rearranged it a little bit in CorelDraw X3 and I obtained a better shape. There is a way to make the unfolding scripts create a better pattern and I will explain it later but now take a look at the pattern after being rearranged in the illustration program:

Vector illustration. And the next thing that we will do is to add the finishing touches: Page 68

Cut along these dotted lines

Vector illustration. Notice that in reality there are only three shapes in there that are repeated several times (plus the gluing tabs added afterward) and that's all that you would need because you could take them in your illustration software and replicate them as many times as needed to obtain enough for a complete pattern but if it was a more irregular shape like, let's say, the same diamond but with the center offset you would need all the shapes that the unfolder provided. Look at such an example:

Do you see? Notice now how you would need all the faces that your unfolder creates because most of the faces will be different and as your geometry and 3D becomes more complex that will be the case and in a fairly good paper model the geometry is relatively complex but there will be times in which the parts will be regular and it will be easier. Usually in character models most of the geometry is all irregular but in things like car wheels or airplane engines and other 3D models and/or parts you could Page 69

find more things with symmetry and for some of those your job could be easier. Handling Compound Curves - The Biggest Problem In Paper Model Design There are some disadvantages in paper models compared to other types of models such as plastic models. In paper models it's much harder to handle compound curves. An example of this is a sphere, designers tackle it in a few ways like creating a low polygon version and just opening and flattening all the faces but this is sort of like the brute force approach to it even though for some things it looks good. Now take a look at this:

As you can see easily the cylinder's curved surface bends or curves in only one direction as indicated by the red arrows, horizontally in this example and in this example too it is perfectly straight vertically but in the next image you can see in the example of a sphere that the curves bend in two directions at the same time:

This or any other compound curve presents a problem for the paper model designer that he/she has to tackle by simplifying the shape of a compound surface and creating a lower polygon version of it similar to the way this is done in 3D video games and here are some examples of this using a couple of Blender's Uvsphere primitives:

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Now take a look at the unfolded patterns that these two low poly spheres produce respectively, (they do not have gluing tabs applied to them):

Vector illustration. These are regular spheres done in a 3D program with a low number of polygonal faces and as you can see they are kinda adequate but a bit squarish or flat faced and if the paper model builder has to build one of these he or she would have to do a lot of folds. The one on the right has a higher number of polygons and you could make it even higher but it starts to become harder and harder for the modeler to cut and score* (to mark the folds by depressing them with a semi-sharp object as to make it much easier to fold without damaging the cardboard as many experienced paper model builders know) and also harder to glue together. Next I will show you some other types of spheres created by using geodesic types of spheres: Page 71

And again see the unfolded patterns for these two spheres (again with no gluing tabs):

Vector illustration. Geodesic spheres. The one in the left is an icosahedron which is made of 20 equilateral triangles and it was created on Blender with the Icosphere primitive* at 1 subdivision (the minimum) (the primitives are the basic geometric shapes that 3D software provide as a starting point for the creation of many models, they can be a cube, a cone, a cylinder, a torus [a donut] or many other basic shapes). The one on the right is the same Icosphere with the Subdivision set at 2 which creates a sphere of 80 sides of irregular triangles and you can create an Icosphere with more subdivisions but observe how complex it is already for paper unfolding in the second example, the Blender unfolding scripts will unfold them just fine without any separation but see how complex it will be for the paper model builder Page 72

and you will see that they don't look as good for spheres as the other ones I will show you further ahead. Other programs create similar geometry with similar primitives, for example 3D Studio Max has primitives that can create something like this and even more and many applications have primitives that can create these types of spheres in addition to the regular spheres. Many designers just do several truncated cones connected one on top of the other that become progressively smaller to create one hemisphere and that usually looks smoother because at least it's very smooth in one direction and in the other direction you have the different levels of cones and of course you just make two of those hemispheres for a whole sphere.
Hemisphere made with truncated cones
Cone 5 Cone 4 Cone 3 Cone 2 Cone 1 2 For a Whole Sphere

Vector illustration.

That before is an assembled whole sphere made with truncated cones, now notice in that same sphere that it is very smooth in at least one direction as the red arrows indicate in the next picture:

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In the example before it is very smooth horizontally because it has a high polygonal resolution horizontally plus another smoothing paper model design trick that I will explain later on but it has a low polygonal resolution vertically and that is a good compromise.

Vector illustration The illustration before is the pattern of the previous sphere made of 10 cones after flattening and without gluing tabs. The third one most common method of dealing with compound curves in a sphere is to create several sections that go side by side that taper upward and are curved on the edges like a leave, you see, several vertical parts that are placed side by side and become progressively smaller as they go up but curving while they do so like half of one of those inflatable beach balls for children and again two of Page 74

those will make a sphere or you can make those parts whole instead of two halves and you would have several parts that look oval shaped but with sharp points at the top and the bottom and again side by side and make the sphere complete in on fell swoop again like the beach ball. Observe that in the following patterns:

Vector illustration. Beach ball style hemisphere (6 sided, no gluing tabs).

Vector illustration. Beach ball style whole sphere (6 sided, no gluing tabs).

Vector illustration. Beach ball style whole sphere (8 sided, no gluing tabs). Page 75

Assembled whole sphere (6 sided on the left and 8 sided on the right). Of course real beach balls look rounder and that's because they are made of vinyl which is flexible and the air pressure inside is pushing outward in all directions but even if in paper they are not that round they still look very good and that is the reason that I did an 8 sided sphere (it can be more than 8 sides of course), because the two extra sides help to compensate for the flatness of the curves horizontally (if the sharp points were the top and bottom) when our sphere is made of cardstock material instead of of vinyl. You can actually use those patterns up there (the curved patterns with black lines filled in white color) to create paper spheres, they are real patterns, all you have to do is to add gluing tabs and these have to be small gluing tabs one beside the other as you have to do in curves contrary to shapes that have straight edges in which you can use longer gluing tabs. Observe this from the front headlight of a car from a model I created:

Observe how the curved parts have gluing tabs that are short (in this case so short that they are triangles but it doesn't have to be always that short, you use judgment, experience will teach you how to do them well) and observe how the straight edges have longer tabs. Let's go back to one of those beach ball style spheres and notice that in this example, contrary to the sphere created with cones, it's very smooth vertically as indicated by the yellow arrows because it has a high vertical resolution but it has a low polygonal resolution horizontally (only 8 sides). Page 76

There are other ways to do a sphere and other compound curves but those are the most common methods for spheres and as you may have noticed the two last methods usually yield a smoother looking sphere with fewer parts and this is a way to use the advantages in your favor by at least creating the sphere or compound curve smooth in at least one direction of the compound curve surface. In the case of the sphere created with the truncated cones the sphere is very smooth at least horizontally and in the beach ball type of sphere the sphere is very smooth at least vertically because it can be very smooth at least in one direction and this contrasts with the first examples in which the spheres were not smooth in either direction. A bit further ahead I will show you the trick that you need to do in order to smooth the the shapes in at least one direction, something done in addition to adding a high number of polygons in a single direction. So you see that there are several ways a designer tackles compound curves and for example in the heads of characters, particularly cartoon characters that have those very round heads like Hello Kitty they sort of use a variation of these but it can be more egg shaped, less round and 3D modeling again comes in handy there. I've seen this character precisely (Hello Kitty) in which different designers did the head in several different ways and some of them are like the methods I described. Next I will show you a couple of examples of some of those paper models which I modeled in 3D and are very similar to the paper model designs that I found on the web. Unfortunately these free Hello Kitty characters paper models are no longer available for download due to a request to their respective designers by Sanrio the creators of Hello Kitty and that's why I won't show you the links to download these paper crafts. If you do a search for free Hello Kitty paper model you may still find photographs of these paper models assembled, anyway you can see here some differences in the methods used to deal with their compound curves:

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Observe the previous picture of Mimi White and Hello Kitty in which the heads are basically made of cones.

And observe this other one of Hello Kitty in which the head was done in a unique way giving it kind of a better appearance. This doesn't mean that the other design is bad, as you can see they look pretty nice anyway, it's just that this one have kind of a smoother appearance in the head due to it not following a standard design shape or method but one a bit creative that despite its low poly resolution has a pretty shape. So to recap, there are then advantages such as the fact that when you create a regular curve like that of a cylinder or any curve that just curves in only one direction you don't have to limit the number of polygons that create it like in low poly game model design so badly, because the curve can be infinitely smooth in the real world well, that can depend on the paper model builder's skill but for all practical purposes it can be infinitely smooth and in 3D game models the number of faces that make a cylinder wall or a curve that bends in only one direction is always finite, though like I stated before in modern games due to the advances in graphics hardware and computer hardware in general this number is increasing enormously creating rounder geometry that is far smoother day by day but the number of faces of these curved surfaces is still finite and in paper models it doesn't necessarily have to be in that way. Now, this doesn't mean that as a designer you will always use the last methods to tackle compound curves because there are times in which you might decide to make them look flat faced on Page 78

purpose for one reason or the other but in most instances it will be better to smooth the curves in one direction if you can. And remember that for those compound curves you can create them infinitely smooth in at least one direction in most cases and as I've been saying I will soon explain a trick that will help you to do just that which is the trick that I used to create the very smooth curves of the beach ball patterns. The Two Directions Of A Compound Curve There is something I want to clear about the 2 directions of a compound curve that may confuse new designers a little and it's the 3 dimensions of an object. Let's take a look again at our compound curve sphere picture:

Somebody may say: But tridimensional objects have 3 dimensions and not 2 directions yes but you have to be able to sort of separate surfaces (compound curves) in your mind, take a look at the 3 dimensions in the same sphere:

You see, you have 3 dimensions that are usually X, Y and Z in 3D software (or width, depth, and height but not necessarily in that order) represented here by the 3 colored arrows: red, green and blue and you can see those 3 dimensions more clearly in a cube:

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Perhaps to understand this better you may think of the sphere as a series of patches or surfaces that sort of match the six sides of the cube (2 sides for every one of the 3 dimensions) such as these:

Of course in the case of these patches in the sphere they would overlap in some areas if you put the six of them together unlike the sides of the cube because of the extra complexity of the surface of the sphere precisely but this is just a hypothetical example so you get to understand the 2 compound curves directions better. If you the take a single one of those six patches, any one of them, you will find our two old friends always, the two directions of a compound curve, observe:

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See? So do not confuse the two directions of a compound curve with your 3 dimensions, all that a compound curve is, is one that bends in two directions at the same time unlike the curve of a cylinder for example which bends in only one direction. There is something else that you must understand about this, there are just two directions for the compound curves but even if there are only two directions for those compound curves they also have an orientation and this means that they can be at any angle in any model or object. Let's take a look at this:

Notice how I placed a sphere made of cones similar to the previous one in different orientations according to the three dimensions (either of the 3 axes X, Y or Z) that we have but notice also that despite that it still has only two directions for its compound curves, see the same but with the two compound curves directions flipped:

This is to show you only the 3 axes of the orientation but those axes can be at any angle of course. I used a beach ball model in the next example again but this one has 12 divisions instead of 6 or 8 and also another sphere made of cones but see how these spheres can be at any arbitrary angle that one could want:

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Now what is important to understand here is that I'm not talking about the rotation of an object, the orientation of the compound curves is not the same as the simple rotation of an object cause of course you can build a paper sphere like this and throw it about an it will be at any angle but that is because it is a mere sphere but if that sphere was the head of a cartoon character it would be glued to the torso of the character and would you put it at such an arbitrary angle? Of course not, you would choose a better orientation. Also, a part that contains compound curves can be something with a very different shape other than a simple sphere, it can be an irregular part with a shape not so symmetrical like a hand or symmetrical but not so round like a boat's hull but first let's see better the orientation issue in the next image, here the body of the figure is a high polygon smooth one but that's just for illustration purposes:

See that the compound curves orientation of the head in the character to the left is made at an arbitrary angle an see how bad it looks but the head of the character to the right looks better because it has a better orientation. Now imagine if you made the body with the same orientation of the head of the character to the left, imagine the whole body with diagonal bands crossing it completely at the same angle of that angled head, it would look awful and it will also be much harder to model like that so if you were to make the body with such a method at such an angle it would look very bad so you would do it differently and besides characters are usually done in a different way due to their usually very irregular shape but more on that later. It doesn't mean that you will always create the orientation of the compound curves at right angles because the character could be in a pose that demands that the head is at a certain angle like when the character is looking upward or nodding the head and in that case you may change the orientation of the head object according to that angle. See this same issue of the Page 82

orientation with a shape a bit less round, like a ship's hull for example. I took the original three spheres made of cones and cut them in half and elongated them to create a pseudo sail ship hull to show you better how this orientation can affect a part design in different ways depending on what you choose:

You have to understand that you have many different options when handling compound curves so you can make a better choice at the moment of designing a part that contains them. See what would happen if you used an arbitrary angle for that sail ship hull:

Here I created the hull orientation at an angle, selected it and entered edit mode to show you the wireframe of the hull so you can see clearly why one cannot simply choose the orientation angle in a thoughtless way because it can end looking very odd and that it is usually better to use straight angles but like I said before not always. Realize that the compound curves orientation can be different not only for different 3D models but also for different 3D parts that belong to the same model. In addition the orientation can be different even for some sections or areas in a single part like for example a character head in which the head can be cylindrical but the top can be like the top hemisphere of the beach ball sphere and the nose or eyes or other parts of the face can have a different orientation. Let me talk to you about an example of that, imagine something similar to the The Simpsons cartoon character Homer, you could do his head just like the way that I've just described, it can be a cylinder, the top of the head is very spherical so it could end like the upper hemisphere of the beach ball or like the upper hemisphere of the sphere made of cones or in other ways and the nose could Page 83

have compound curves similar to the cones sphere but with an horizontal orientation instead of vertical and it would be more elongated of course because his nose is not a perfect sphere and the eyes could be just textures but let's say that we were modeling a large head like the upper torso only and because of the relatively large size we decided to model the eyes geometrically instead of just creating them painted with textures then we could use one of those spheres (or perhaps only half or of one) to do the eyes and these eyes in turn could have their own different orientation, do you follow? The different parts can have different orientations and different areas can have different orientations within a single part so you could have a combination of orientations in a single part. You can simply choose which orientation is better for every part or area that contains such compound curves. Observe a part of the head of such a Homer like character in the next picture and notice already the different orientations in the different parts such as the eyes compared to the part that is going to be the top of his head in the middle example:

One detail here in that last paragraph was that I mentioned that you could use a cylinder for his head and that it could end as a half beach ball sphere at the top (see that in the picture at the center) but notice that the cylinder would be very round due to it being high poly around horizontally but the beach ball half would be low poly horizontally if you used a vertical orientation (it could look kinda good if you did it that way) so it's kinda incompatible but not necessarily so and I'll explain better. A hemisphere made of cones would not have that problem either if the orientation was vertical (the example to the right in the picture) and also using the same beach ball hemisphere but with a different orientation (the example to the left) and using a different orientation it's another option but it can still work with the beach ball hemisphere with vertical orientation as the middle example if you chose that one because remember that paper even though it doesn't bend too well in two directions at the same time it still does bend a little and this is something that sometimes you can use and in this example it could work, you may have to give the beach ball hemisphere a little more divisions horizontally, perhaps something like 12 divisions and that could help but not necessarily that many, it may work with less horizontal divisions so you just try until you find what is the best compromise an this trick is something that you could put to good use in some parts of some models here and there. A Common Misunderstanding About Quads And Triangles I think that you should take a look at some communications that I had with the creator of the BPaperizer script Czestmyr through e-mail regarding the Blender Unfold script vs the B-Paperizer script, the following are excerpts from the exchange of e-mails that we had:

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From Angel D. Guzmn PixelOz: I tried your script and I found that it worked really better than the Unfold script included with Blender. The other script works kinda simpler because it uses quads but because of that precisely I found that it gets into trouble with some parts of some models. Some people may argue that by dividing the parts in triangles first is more complicated but in some tests I found that your script worked better. I think your approach is more precise exactly because you used triangles instead. The triangles can be ignored if you wish so after the pattern is unfolded when you use the pattern in an illustration program or a bitmap editor for final work. If you allow me to publish this script I will show you what I'm trying to do after it's done (It's almost done) and you will see why your script worked better than the other script in some parts and for some purposes. It is kinda sad that your script is not as well known as the Blender Unfold script cause I think yours is more accurate than the other and it's also much, much faster. I really hope that one day your script is also included with Blender as well as an alternative. I believe that your script is that valuable as well. I was able to get your script to work with Blender up to 2.49b but not yet with the new Blender 2.5 Alpha 0. Well the new Blender has many, many changes and it will be the same for many other scripts. I hope that you keep developing it and maybe with what I'm doing your script will get to be known better. What do you think? Hope to hear from you soon. This was part of his reply: From Czestmyr: Hello Angel! I'm glad that the script proved useful. I had similar observations as you regarding the exactness of the unfolding with the original Blender Unfold. That's why I decided to create my script in the first place. If I were to support quads (and I was seriously considering it), not only would the implementation be more complicated, it would also cause ambiguousity. Consider four points of a quad that don't lie on a plane. How should the script divide the quad into triangles? There are two ways and the script has no way of knowing which one of them is the one that the user wants. And my last reply to him: From Angel D. Guzman, PixelOz: Exactly, and as a matter of fact there is a bit of confusion in people about quad and triangles, specially in new 3D modelers about when and how to use one or the other (at least there are a few tutorials out there about that) but there is also something else that people confuse about them at first. Quads and triangles both have advantages and disadvantages for 3D modeling but I found that there is a bit of a misconception about quads and it is precisely what you mentioned. Some people seem to think that all quads are really flat but experienced 3D modelers know that that is not the case. The most fundamental polygon in the universe is the triangle no matter what and also a true triangle is always flat no matter how you arrange its three points, it is always flat. For quads that is not always the case because you can have a perfectly flat quad but you move one of its corner vertexes at some angles away from the flat plane of the other 3 (like perpendicular for example or at other angles away from the perfect alignment of the other 3) and your quad is no longer flat. As you probably know this happens a lot when for example you take a model made in quads and twist it or modify it in other ways, your quad vertexes get out of alignment with the flat plane, they may look like they are flat for inexperienced people but if you examine some of those quads carefully up close you will find their Page 85

vertexes out of alignment from the flat plane in many instances. So in reality what many people don't know is that quads are always made of two triangles, what happens is that 3D software shows and allow people to handle them as quads but fundamentally underneath quads are always made of two triangles and that's what the software is handling beneath no matter what the user sees. If you take a quad and move all the vertexes in any direction randomly in the 3 dimensions you don't always have a flat quad but you always have two flat triangles and no matter how you move those 4 vertexes you will always have two flat triangles. If you take a quad plane in a 3D software and do what I told you and you examine it carefully up close you will be able to notice the two flat triangles when rotating it about. If a person wants to see this better all they have to do is to create a plane and divide it in half with a segment and then if that person disarranges the vertexes in any way they will see their two perfectly flat triangles always. I think that this may be the why the other script has some problems sometimes because it may have a fundamental flaw, possibly the script writer is trying the best it can to flatten the quads and maybe that's why it is so much slower than yours but just maybe but like you say how does the script "knows" how to flatten those quads that are out of alignment well? I think that this is why when I attempted to flatten a long chain of polygons several times the other script couldn't really flatten the part so when I looked at it from the side it was somewhat flat but not completely, in some cases it was but with your script the figures were always flat. Also with the other script sometimes I ended with a part out of proportions even when I followed the rules carefully (remove double vertexes, recalculate all normals outside, being careful that the scale is 1 in all three axes etc.) Your script produced much more accurate parts in my opinion more often (if not always). I'm not saying that the effort of the other script writer is bad, actually it is commendable because the person tried to do something that is very difficult and for more simpler models it can work OK, besides the script writer may have known about that problem and just tried to create an unfolder that's kinda simpler to use for the sake of simpler models so it may still be a useful script and I praise the effort of anybody that is trying to do this freely as a service to the community but later on I will show you a bit more of what can be done with your script and why I like it so much better as soon as I finish what I'm doing which will be in the next few days. That was the last e-mail I sent to him but I feel obliged to explain to you the reader this whole thing better cause this is something that if you understand will allow you to use the scripts better. To clear a subject that many people new to paper modeling get a little confused about sometimes. Here we have a basic cube made of quads in edit mode:

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See what happens when we pull one of its vertexes:

Even after doing that you can see from this angle that the face from which we pull this vertex still isn't divided in triangles and it looks smooth but in reality there is a division there as indicated in the next picture by the blue line that I drew over the previous image:

So let's rotate the cube a little and see what happens from a different angle:

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Observe now in wireframe view the triangular division indicated by the blue arrow from this angle and notice that even if everything has being selected with the A key it doesn't have a corresponding segment (a yellow line) because it is still a quad but you can see clearly there how the software has really divided the quad into two triangles underneath, this is what 3D modelers call the invisible quad edge, the software presents you a smooth face in quad mode but beneath it's still handling our basic polygon: the perfectly flat triangle, two for every quad. See that the division does exist at the exact location where I drew the blue line before. Now take a look at the interesting thing that happens when you divide the model into triangles automatically after selecting everything as it is already done here by using the Ctrl + T key combination in Blender:

See that unfortunately even if the program had created that other segment division automatically when we pulled that vertex outwards, when we used the automatic triangles division it shifted the division to the opposite vertexes of that particular quad that we had modified. For the faces that remain flat it isn't an issue at all but notice the area indicated by the blue arrow and you can see clearly that the division has shifted and therefore also the shape of our model. Let's take a look at it in solid view mode from another angle where it's easy to see the change of direction of that triangular division:

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So what do you do if that change does concern you? In some instances this is insignificant as the following example shows:

Notice the 3D shape but still in quads and see it now after being automatically converted to triangles:

In reality the automatic conversion didn't change it much which is something that you can see Page 89

better if we assemble our shape in paper, if we did so this is more or less how it would look:

So in many instances the automatic conversion to triangles won't be a problem at all but if in a low poly figure that you have to do anyway it does change the shape of your model in a way that you don't like, you can change the triangles direction of selected quads with the Flip Triangle Edges command (select faces, go to the Mesh menu and then select Flip Triangle Edges or use Ctrl+Shift+F) see the direction of the triangles in this first picture in which I selected two different quads:

And see it after the triangles were flipped:

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Many other 3D software have the ability to flip triangles in quads like that, 3D Studio Max for example does that too. Different 3D programs handle this in different ways but this is the way it's handled in Blender in those low poly situations and other situations. Of course in that 3D model example you wouldn't notice anything if you rendered it again but what if we go back to our previous very low poly modified cube?

There we have our 3D model as it got after the automatic conversion but if we want the shape that we had before the automatic conversion to triangles we select the two triangles that form a quad as it is already done in the last illustration and we flip the triangles:

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You can clearly see in the previous illustration how different the geometry is now so if you do get into problems with the conversion to triangles to be able to use the B-Paperizer script or to solve some problems with the Unfold script too that's one of the things you can do in Blender to fix it. In reality and this may come as a surprise to some paper modelers, unfolding or flattening quads in the strictest sense of the way in which 3D software handles them is a mathematical impossibility. Huh? No way! Oh yes. Why? Because you can unfold quads as quads just as long as they remain perfectly flat only but in 3D software as you can see they do not always remain flat, sometimes they do but sometimes they do not and when you move vertexes in a certain way in which they move away from the flat plane of a quad you end up forcefully with two triangles for that particular quad and this can only be flattened accurately as two triangles, why? Because when you try to put the geometric figure back together at the moment of gluing it if you do not recreate those folds that were there in those quads that had their vertexes out of alignment with the flat plane it would be impossible to make the vertexes align again together at their correct position. You can only really flatten quads that are already flat in your 3D model but those that lost their flatness even one bit have to be folded in the middle that same amount, that same bit. If the amount is very, very tiny it may pass without being noticed because it would be lost as a margin of error of the real physical world but it has to be very, very tiny for that and that is not always the case. So the basic rule is that if a quad was flat it can be unfolded as a flat or in other words if it was flat it can be flat at the moment of building the model but if it was not it has to be put back as a folded quad, period. Remember your basic cube, it can be flattened totally without converting it into triangles (with the Unfold script) because its quads are completely flat. Remember now when I told Czestmyr this particular phrase in my e-mail to him: The triangles can be ignored if you wish so after the pattern is unfolded when you use the pattern in an illustration program or in a bitmap editor for final work, that is true but I have to clear that this is only if those quads are flat in the first place like in the case of the cube and then of course you can ignore the middle lines that divide the quads when you are drawing and you will end of course with the same pattern that the Unfold script created with a cube, but if the quad was a folded quad in the 3D world the folding line have to remain and cannot be deleted or ignored, do you see? Some other figures can be flattened as quads too such as that old flat faced pseudo-sphere that we been using:

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These quads can be unfolded as flat because remember that when we divided it as triangles its faces remained flat, because they were already flat. And in other figures this can happen again such as a dodecahedron:

And this is because its faces even though they are really made of triangles in a 3D program those triangles remain perfectly flat in a true dodecahedron:

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And this is the same for any other geometric figure or 3D model in which the faces are truly flat. You can also have a 3D model that has both, flat faced quads and folded quads of course, so simply in such a model those quads that are truly flat will flatten perfectly and those quads that are not have to be folded back when assembling and that's that. So let's see how that applies to our two scripts. We can use our old pseudo sphere for demonstration purposes and we separate a section of it for unfolding:

We unfold that section and we get this:

So we have no problem at the moment with either script, they both can flatten that section just fine, in the case of B-Paperizer you would see the same shape but with the quads divided into triangles, so far so good but what happens when we do something that gets our quads vertexes out of the flat plane, let's try twisting it (it certainly helps to twist them):

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There are different ways to twist a 3D mesh, the Taper and Twist script is one but there are others. In the section titled: Exceptions To The High Poly Modeling Techniques in this same chapter I will mention another method that I used for that sphere. And now we separate again a section for unfolding:

Next look at what happened when I tried to run this section through the Unfold script, the following is a view from the top:

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It couldn't unfold the whole thing, I tried and tried but it couldn't do it, and look at it from the side:

You can see clearly that is not flat at all and observe something else if we look at the part from a different angle:

Notice how that polygon at the edge of the pattern clearly shows that the vertex indicated by the blue arrow is out of alignment with the rest of the quad to which it belongs. This is where the Unfold script gets into trouble. So now we turn the faces into triangles to unfold them with B-Paperizer but observe the arrangement of the triangles at one of the tips of this figure. It's kinda not so good so what do we do?:

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What we do is that we flip the triangles of that quad:

Now our triangles are in a better position, a minor correction. Then we select the cutting segments (in this case it is an edge that is already cut but for B-Paperizer to work we have to do it anyway):

After that we unfold the pattern and this is what we get: Page 97

It is finished and if you look at it from the side you will notice that the pattern is completely flat:

But the interesting thing is something kinda funny. If we use the Unfold script with some shapes in which the quads had been converted to triangles the script will be able to unfold a few additional things that it couldn't unfold before which again is related to the problem of trying to unfold quads. Unfold still ran into problems with some shapes and overall I found that B-Paperizer went places that the Unfold script couldn't touch and that's why I recommend it better for more complex and higher polygonal shapes. Now, you may still be able to unfold some patterns with the Unfold script by using the Overlap button which forces the unfolding of the pattern by sacrificing a perfect arrangement or a better arrangement of the faces, and this technique may work specially if the shape is converted to triangles first, the only thing is that later on you have to rearrange the parts a bit in your illustration program and for bitmap type image editors this may not be such a good idea, also sometimes the overlap is so tiny that it's a bit difficult to see where it was so keep all that in mind if you do decide to use it anyway. Higher Resolution Textures For More Quality Textures is another area in which the paper model designer doesn't have to follow the same methodology of 3D game models literally because in 3D game models the texture resolution of the models have to be limited to prevent the display and animation from slowing down when rendering real-time animation* (animation that is calculated on the fly, at the moment) and this slowdown also Page 98

happens as I explained before, if polygonal resolution is too high. It also has to be limited due to memory limits of some graphic cards. Like in pre-rendered animations* (animations that are non realtime animations in which the frames are calculated with considerable more time and special methods for usually much higher quality), so just as in pre-rendered movie 3D models, the textures of paper models can be of much higher resolution than for real-time 3D graphics so the model designer can take advantage of that and create textures of much higher quality for paper models if the designer wishes so due to the fact that they don't have to be animated in any way, real-time or otherwise. When designing paper models you have to learn to circumvent the disadvantages and to use the advantages in your favor to produce models of better quality. So one thing that can be done to improve the quality of a model translated or ripped from a game model is to create better textures for it either in bitmap or vector form. Many paper model designers translate a game model directly to a paper model and leave the textures as they are without improvement because precisely they are already done but because many choose the low polygon versions of game models precisely because of the ease of conversion to a paper model they get relatively low resolution textures sometimes because those older 3D game models have also relatively low res textures. There is a gamma of this resolution subject depending on how old or new the model is, and I mean that in very old 3D games the 3D models were very low resolution in both polygon count and pixel count (texture resolution), in modern 3D games the resolution is much higher in both but this sort of defeats the purpose or reason paper model designers pick 3D game models which is the low polygonal count for the purpose of simplicity for unfolding.

Low poly house model without textures on the left and with textures on the right and see how with good textures the model really comes to life. Do not underestimate the difference that quality textures can make. In modern 3D games this may no longer be the case because polygonal resolution is getting very high already and that's too bad for paper modelers because at least the higher quality of modern textures would be very good for paper modeling. Low poly game characters are easy to convert to paper models and medium poly characters can be used but they usually start to fall in the medium to advanced category of complexity for assembly. Now, in terms of texture quality the 3D game models that maybe best for a straight conversion would be perhaps the ones in the middle, those not too old or too new but the texture quality may still be improved by the paper model designer if he or she wishes to Page 99

do so. Some people may argue with that but it's because we are talking in relative terms, for games those textures were more than adequate because the screen resolution is relatively low when compared to print resolution and people that worked on preparing artwork for the press know this very well. Graphic artists know very well that when printing you can use much higher resolutions than those used for monitors and the difference in results is very big. Please do not get me wrong, I'm not saying that paper model designers are doing wrong with converting the 3D game models straight to paper models, I'm not saying that and by far because after all many of them are doing this for free and you have to respect that, what I'm saying is that there is the choice of improving the quality of the textures by using the textures that they got as a template to paint over them at higher resolutions in the case of a bitmap editor or in vectors in the case of an illustration program. What I'm saying is that this is an alternative and one that can be used to improve the quality of a model translated from a game, this is one of those things I was talking about when I was talking about textures that can be of higher quality a few paragraphs ago and that it's an advantage that the paper model designer can use. Texture resolution and polygonal resolution are two independent things, I've seen very low poly models with very high bitmap or vector texture resolution (which is virtually infinite) and sometimes they look very nice and this can be the case of models that are designed for children in which is usually better to preserve a low poly resolution for ease of assembly but also for low poly models that are done like that on purpose for artistic reasons and for other reasons, so the point here is that in those cases in which high poly resolution is not an option you do have the option of using high texture resolution. Do not underestimate the improvements that can be done with higher resolution and higher quality textures to the appearance of the surface of a model and do not underestimate the difference that it can do for a paper model in general, it can make a huge difference and game designers have known this for a long time, even at those relatively low resolutions of older 3D games they knew that the texture artwork had to be top notch specially to compensate for the lack of higher polygonal resolution and also to compensate for the lack of precisely higher texture resolutions too. Today texture resolution in games is becoming already pretty high as I have mentioned before but if you convert an older lower polygon 3D game model to a paper model you do have the option of creating higher quality textures if you wish to do so. Look at the difference in a simple game 3D model when seen with and without textures, see the enormous difference that the textures make to a model after being applied to it, now, even if in 3D games we are talking about relatively low resolutions, good quality texture artwork make a huge difference and the important point for paper model designers is that it is a principle that they can apply to designing paper models. Paper modelers can design high quality textures and improve the appearance of their designs a lot by taking advantage of the much higher resolution of modern desktop printers or the printing press if they are going to produce a model to be printed in a print shop. The polygon reduction tool that I mentioned can be used to reduce a 3D game model that has high polygonal count (like some of the modern ones or those used for pre-rendered animations or non realtime animations which are much more polygon heavy) to create a lower polygon one and then unfold it and this is one thing that can lead to a bad paper model if not used with judgment and the other is just translating a low polygon model directly to a paper model without modification, this depends on many factors including the type of model, the quality of the game model, the quality of the textures and other things, yes it can be done correctly but the important point I want to make is that if you want to do a conversion from a game model like a vehicle or a spaceship or if you want to design a low polygon simple paper model use judgment and common sense. Learning From Other Paper Model Designers

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Observe how the best models are designed and constructed on many free models from the Internet, not all of them are perfect, there are some that are nowhere near as good as the Canon or Yamaha models but there are models on the Internet for free that are superb. If you want to learn how to create paper models observe their construction carefully and learn from them. You can also observe some of the well designed but simpler models and learn a lot from those too. This is one thing that can teach you a lot about how to design paper models well in the first place and building a few of them first will also help the new designer a lot, no, it doesn't hurt to assemble a few models first before you tackle the problem of designing them, it will give you a much clearer picture of how they are put together. So if you haven't assembled a few paper models and at least one of medium or high complexity it maybe a good idea to do so before you start designing one and you can start with simpler models and work your way up to more complex ones that are usually more detailed. Observe carefully how other designers handled the compound curves problem and other things like the internal reinforcements parts in models like sea ships and airplanes, in many instances you don't have to reinvent the wheel for every design problem that you find for your model though it's not always the case but nevertheless I think that it will teach you a lot. Learning from other models and model designers can teach a new paper engineer a lot and it's something that I don't see people mentioning that often. Smoothing And Professional High Polygon Resolution Paper Model Creation In this section I will talk about an important trick that can be used for precisely the purpose of smoothing the curves in one direction. I will show you what I did in order to smooth those beach balls patterns back there a while ago from a 3D model. There is a way of simplifying shapes that are highly polygonal by using an illustration program, it is not absolutely necessary but it can help create those smoother parts. You can simplify the shape once inside an illustration program and this is something that is quite a conundrum for many new paper modelers and it's the one thing that makes many of the new designers believe that the only way to do a paper model is by always using a low polygonal resolution and I will explain here how many of the concepts that I been talking about before come together, those concepts about making curves that go in one direction smoother and making curves that go in two directions at the same time smoother in at least one direction, I will explain you now what is the trick that professionals use (yes there is a trick) to make models with a high polygonal resolution. But, but, if I create a model with too many polygons then it becomes too complex and the model builder is going to have a hard time putting it together, and it's going to be impossible to unfold also, no, and let me say that again, NO, it's just a big misunderstanding. No, you don't have to draw all the segments of the cone and then expect the paper model builder to fold all those lines, you can just draw the outer edge of the cone and when doing that you can draw a perfectly circular line over the top and bottom edges of the cone (top only when it's a truncated cone) by using the circular tool available on many illustration programs with the resulting effect of smoothing the cone curves with it. Let me explain better. There is a small margin of error when doing this but believe me it's very small and it usually disappears in the real world, the big majority of times it works like a charm and anyway you can print and test a prototype part and make small adjustments if it doesn't fit and that's it.

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Take a look at the cylinders in this picture. The one in the left is a 10 sided low polygons cylinder and if a modeler was to assemble it then it would be fairly straightforward. The one in the middle is a 48 sides smoother one but as you can see it is still faceted, you can still see the flat sides and if the modeler was to assemble it he or she would have to score the cardboard a lot and it would take too long to assemble. Now look at the one to the right, it is completely smooth, what you may not know is that I created the one in the right using the same pattern of the 48 sided cylinder in the middle as I will show you later. Let's first take a closer look at this starting with the cylinder to the left:

Vector illustration. This previous pattern is an unfolding of the left cylinder done in Blender with the Unfold script. There are two ways to do this and let's explain the first which is harder but that depends on the complexity of what you will do. The pattern above is not exactly the way we want it. So we will arrange the polygonal faces differently in our illustration software, now notice how in reality there are only two different faces in that template, a triangle and a rectangle. Notice that all those rectangles and triangles are the same, that's not always the case but you will find this in many occasions and in reality we only need one of each (one triangle and one rectangle) in an illustration program to create our 3D part because once we have the triangle and the rectangle inside an illustration program we can easily Page 102

replicate as many of them as we need and rearrange them in a proper pattern but in this case all I had to do was to rearrange three triangles, and of course if you have an intelligent guide system in your software like those already mentioned it's very easy to do and this is what we will get:

Vector illustration. Notice how I rearranged the triangles that were out of whack and put them in a better place in the example above. But there is another way to do this and that is by using seams. Let's go back to our low poly cylinder, enter Edit Mode (Tab), activate Edge select mode (Ctrl+Tab+2) and mark the edges that will be used for cutting which you see as yellow in this picture after selecting them:

The blue arrows to the left indicate the two edges that I left so they can become the hinges of the lids of the cylinder. The blue arrow to the right points to the edge that will indicate where the cylinder wall will be opened. After we have selected the edges that will be seams they have to be turned into Blender seams by hitting Ctrl+E with the cursor over the 3D window and then selecting Mark Seam in the menu that appears and this is what we will get:

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In that last picture you can see that the same edges that we have selected have become our seams (they are indicated in Blender with lines of a different color around the selected edges) and look at the pattern that the Unfold script produced after this:

Our pattern is now arranged in a way that doesn't need rearrangement like before. But if we use the B-Paperizer script instead we have to convert everything to triangles first and to mark seams we don't have to create Blender seams, we just have to select in Edit Mode (Tab) those edges that will be used for cutting or opening the model part:

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You can see now the pattern that B-Paperizer created:

As you can see it's really very similar except for the additional triangle lines in the middle of the quads in the center vertical rectangle but after editing in our illustration software we will get the same pattern with both scripts but also remember that you can use the 179 degrees trick of the Edge gener. button/NET slider in the B-Paperizer script to eliminate the triangles as an alternative:

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Vector illustration. In this step I deleted the lines that were unnecessary. In the case of CorelDraw X3 it's very easy to do that by using the special Create Boundary function. If your illustration software doesn't have such a feature then you can join the shapes and remove the lines by hand or with other methods, it's not that difficult, a tool like this makes it much easier and faster but it's not difficult by hand or by other methods. As you can see in the next picture I created a custom toolbar in CorelDrawX3 with several commands that I use often and many of them for paper model design, including the Publishes to PDF exporter, the Interactive Transparency tool (for texture artwork), the arrange commands which allow me to change the stacking order of the objects (in what position they are when they are placed one on top of the other but do not confuse this with layers cause every layer has its own set of objects with their own stacking order and an example would be the Forward One command which brings an object one position up in the stacking order), an icon that allows me to switch quickly the Dynamic Guides on or off, alignment commands like the Align and Distribute command which opens a dialog box with many object alignment and distribution functions, etc.

Above, the red arrows show the icon for the Create Boundary Tool in CorelDraw X3 If you wonder why the Create Boundary command appears twice in my screenshot it's because it normally appears when the program thinks that you need it because in the default toolbar it only appears under some conditions cause it's a Context Sensitive Toolbar (meaning that it appears depending on what you are doing) but those commands that I placed in my custom toolbar are always present there and there are some situations in which the software isn't smart enough to know when to Page 106

put the tool in there so by creating a custom toolbar I force them to be there for me 100% of the time and many of those that I placed there are very useful for paper modeling. As I told you before you can use the 179 degrees Edge gener. button/NET slider trick and eliminate the triangles because the quads are truly flat but if you keep lowering the value of that slider much more at some moment or another even the lines that divide the quad sections will disappear too, in this case at 144 degrees, try it with a 10 sided cylinder and you will see that at 144 degrees the inside lines that create the rectangles will disappear but just at 145 degrees they will reappear because 144 degrees is the angle of one of those rectangles in the cylinder wall to the other adjacent rectangle in a 10 sided cylinder. In the case of the cube at 179 degrees the triangles disappear and the quad lines remain but at 89 degrees they disappear too and what you obtain is an empty outline pattern with no lines inside whatsoever and at 90 degrees 1 line will reappear and at 91 degrees they all will reappear and this is because of course the cube is 90 degrees all over and that is the threshold of its quad lines and of course this is not desirable cause in the cube and the 10 sided cylinder we do need those lines as fold lines but we can eliminate the unnecessary triangles and the purpose of this explanation is to make you understand better how the NET slider works. Another possibility is the use of the Weld tool in CorelDraw, you can do it like that too but in the case of CorelDraw X3 it's just easier to use the Create Boundary tool, now, in the case of other illustration applications that do not have a similar tool you may use something similar to that CorelDraw Weld tool, it's called different in different illustration software but it performs the same function of joining several shapes into a single silhouette, in Inkscape it's called Union, in Illustrator it's done with one of the Pathfinder tools, in Open Office Draw it's the Merge command, and it's also available in many other illustration programs, it does this among other things:

Vector illustration. If you select all the 10 parts of that pizza shaped figure up there (in the first and second unfolded cylinder illustrations) and then click on the Create Boundary button in CorelDraw it will create an outer edge shape without having to join everything manually or with those tools I've just mentioned, then you just delete the older shapes and you are left with just an outer edge like in the 10 sided circle in the following figure:

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Cut along these dotted lines

Vector illustration. Of course you leave the rectangles as they were because those lines in between the rectangles are folding lines for the builder. In this same figure I added gluing tabs and colored the design. Notice that I made the tabs color lighter to make them easier to identify and also added some orange circles to them for the same purpose. That's an option that you can use. In addition notice (if you zoom in) the dotted lines that I added between the round parts and the gluing tabs close to them, that's so the builder can see right away that he/she have to make a cut there to separate the circular shape from those tabs. Notice too that those tabs had to be compromised in their shape to accommodate the circular parts. I also added a small legend below the figure indicating to the modeler that he/she has to cut along those dotted lines. Usually it's a good idea to put such instructions in some corner or close to the upper or lower edge of the parts page in those pages that contain figures with such cutting lines or at the beginning of the document that contain the parts or in the document or pages that contain building instructions preferably also at the beginning of them. In this case I used dashed lines to show a special cut line and I showed the fold lines as whole lines but some designers like to use dashed lines for the fold lines instead and if you do that then you may use a slightly different line pattern for the special cuts such as a dotted line or a custom dashed line pattern that many illustration programs offer and you would show both of these line patterns and their meaning in the legend. Now that was for the purpose of creating a simple shape with flat sides but how about that smoothing I was talking about? OK take a look at the second unfolded cylinder pattern from the cylinder in the middle that has 48 sides:

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Vector illustration. You can see clearly that the Unfold script in Blender got the job done but it's very messy. That's because we didn't use seams, if we marked the seams we could obtain a better pattern but one alternative would be to rearrange the parts like the way it was explained before but it would be a bit more time consuming. Believe me it's not that big a deal to rearrange them using CorelDraw or Illustrator it can be done but it's a bit time consuming with other illustration programs and in bitmap editors, Ufffff! And anyway why waste that much time? Now, if we could use the B-Paperizer script instead of Unfold we would have a lot of triangles to deal with and that would be even worst but in BPaperizer we are forced to mark our cutting seams. We obtained that unfolding from the cylinder in the next picture which is our old 48 sided cylinder:

That messy pattern came about by unfolding that cylinder when it's just like what you see it in the last picture without marking seams. Page 109

Despite the use of seams with the Unfold script that does not mean that it will always do a good job cause sometimes it will not work so well even after that, do you remember the flattened pattern of the sphere made of cones? I had to use the B-Paperizer script for that one because when I unfolded it with the Unfold script it was a mess similar to the previous messy pattern of the 48 sides cylinder and it unfolded it messy like that even after creating Blender seams for it but I took the pattern and converted everything to triangles and selected the seam edges that I wanted and I left a few edges that were going to be used as connection points between the different cones unselected and it generated a pattern very similar to the final pattern that I showed you, the only thing that I had to do in my illustration software was to rotate the upper and lower cones a little and that was it and then I just used the Create Boundary function in CorelDraw X3 to generate outlines of the different cones and afterward I deleted the imported pattern and that's all that I did to it. That is why I want you to take a look at the next picture:

What I did was to select all the side polygons (those that make the wall of the cylinder) and separated them into a different object then I unfolded only those polygons first, the polygons that make the wall of the cylinder and you don't really have to unfold the circle because it's already flat but you select it apart from the cylinder wall and apply the Unfold script to it anyway, why? Because the Unfold script in Blender only exports as SVG those patterns that it has unfolded, so I unfolded the cylinder wall separately and saved it as a SVG file and then I unfolded the circle (which left it looking the same of course) and then saved it to a second SVG file. And notice that I only used one of the covers (lids) from either the bottom or the top because you only need one in this case, you just import one into your illustration program and duplicate it afterward but this is what you get now:

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Vector illustration. Do you see how different the pattern looks when Blender unfolded it as separate parts? Sometimes it's just much easier to separate some parts in your 3D application in this way before unfolding it or sending it to a program such as Pepakura as I showed you in the picture of the cylinder with the separated top in order to get a cleaner pattern, this is another choice that we have in case that we get into some trouble with the unfolders despite having marked the seams anyway, so if you do and the unfolder refuses to behave in one way or another remember that you can separate not only the parts from the model but also sections from the parts and by doing this you simplify things much further for the unfolders when they refuse to budge. Well, we simplified a lot here for the Blender Unfold script but that's not always the case and in some other unfolding applications like Pepakura or unfolding plugin like Waybe in Google Sketchup it may be different but as a general rule you have to separate things like parts of your 3D model or sections of the parts (in worst case scenarios) before unfolding. Let's say you have a small spaceship to unfold, you may have to separate the engines and the canopy for unfolding or if it's an airplane you may have to separate the propeller or parts of the landing gear, the engines, the wings and other things before unfolding and you may still have to then separate some sections of these individual parts to be able to unfold them in an easier way or to be able to unfold such a part at all, with time and experience you will learn how to do this very well and this book will give you a head start. Now, sometimes such as this case I only unfolded one of the lids of the cylinder because I knew that it was identical to the other, what I do next is to replicate the cover and put it together. So to recap, you have the other alternative of course, the option of using seams with either script but by now you probably have a pretty good idea of how to use that option and I wanted to show you how to do manual separation in case that later on it could not be solved by simply marking seams on a part that is too complex cause if that happens then your only choice is to go back to the manual method of separating like this. This is the resulting pattern after separating and rearranging manually:

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Vector illustration. And here is the interesting part of creating a smoother pattern, of course that is already smoother because of the high number of polygons that I used to create the cylinder (I gave it 48 sides), but instead of merely creating an outline with just straight sides I drew over the circular patterns a perfectly smooth circle using the circle tool of an illustration program. For the rectangular part it's easy, all you need is the outer rectangle and because it needs straight lines anyway it's easy but for the circles we draw a smoother circle on top of the outer edge and we obtain this:
Enlargement Smooth red line is in the middle of the Black straight lines. Red line is a perfectly Round circle over the original segmented pattern.

Vector illustration. Zoom in really, really close, specially to the area of the enlarged blue square and take a good look at the black straight lines pattern beneath the smooth red circle. Notice how parts of it show outside the red circle and how some others show inside the red circle, that's because the red circle is drawn in the middle of the outer black lines to average the values of their measures. Notice how the vertexes of the black pattern are outside the red line and how the segments that connect those vertexes still show inside Page 112

the red circle, you see, I didn't align the outer edge of the red circle line (it has a thickness after all of course, even if it's just a line) to the vertexes and I didn't align the inner red circle edge against the straight segments either, I aligned the smooth red circle in the middle of both to create a circle that will be much closer to the measure of the vertical rectangle that forms the wall of the cylinder. Well, this is not a perfect method because there is a small margin of error in it but believe me the circle's perimeter measure will be very close to the height of the large vertical rectangle and if it ain't all you need to do is to make a small adjustment either to the vertical length of the rectangle or to the red circle size. You have to build a prototype of the part and see if it fits together well. You might have to make some small adjustments, by either enlarging or shrinking the smooth circle a little bit or enlarging or reducing the vertical measure of the large rectangle but more often than not the parts will fit just nicely. Before you make any adjustments it is better to make a copy and perform the changes to the copy and leave the original untouched because you don't know how much the adjustment will need to be and you may need to go back to the original to see its measures as a reference point. Once you have the correct measures you may delete the original if you wish. One important detail is that the more faces or polygons you use for your original 3D model the more accurate your final shape will be in this method, the more polygons you use, the smaller and smaller the margin of error will become. I used a 48 sides cylinder as a starting point in the previous example but I could have used a 100 sides or 200 hundred sides cylinder and it would have been even smoother before applying the red circle. The exact amount that you will need is something that you will get with experience so you don't have to necessarily make it 200 hundred sides you see, in the previous example I used 48 sides and it was just enough so experiment with it a little until you get the hang of it and you get the number that is right for you. Now you see that the low polygon mentality is not necessary the best way to go for a paper model all the time, realize that in this case I went totally in the opposite direction! I increased the number of polygonal faces a lot to create a smooth pattern afterward and the more polygonal faces you use the merrier (well to a degree) because you are going to draw over it a simplified shape to get a smoother model but remember again that this is a cylinder and it curves in only one direction because it's straight vertically but in the example of the sphere that was made with cones that is higher in polygons it's smooth in only one direction because it is a compound curve, it could have more cones vertically, sure, but, the more you add the more complex it will become to assemble so you have to determine what is the best low polygonal resolution vertically too according to what you are doing and in the case of a model of a small size too many cones could make it way too difficult to assemble. With time and experience you will be able to determine what is the appropriate number according to the kind of model that you want to do because for example if you are building a model designed for children it's imperative that you keep it very simple and low polygon but if you are building a professional model targeted at expert model builders you may decide to use much higher resolution but there will be a practical limit too of how much complexity you will be able to put into the model before it becomes too tough to assemble for the majority of modelers. I've seen models of extreme complexity, make no mistake, but this is the exception and not the rule and this is a niche that you will be targeting and if you want your model to be accepted by the majority of people you have to draw a line somewhere in the level of complexity so people are not turned away from it. Another thing that you could do is what some model making companies or people do and that is to do models of different skill levels with different levels of complexity. That way you cover more bases because you can appeal to the modeler that is looking for a simpler model because he/she is a beginner Page 113

or because he/she likes models that are not excessively complex but you also cover the bases for those modelers that are more advanced and want more complex and/or beautiful models. Advanced models are something that give both the designer and builder a lot of pride, it's simply wonderful to see a very complex model assembled so despite what I said before I don't mean that they should be ignored. I personally like better the more complex and elaborate models and there are plenty of modelers that think like that. There are commercial paper model companies that create models of different skill levels and there are free model designers that also do this, so you could have for example skill level 1 models that are easy enough for children (or you could have a separate category for children also) and you could have level 2 for models that are intermediate in complexity and/or quality and you could have level 3 models of high complexity and/or quality for expert builders, you could have more divisions of course, that's up to you. All this is not a new idea, in other hobbies this is done all the time like for example, the model rocket companies such as Estes that make models of different skill levels and plastic model companies that make models of different skill levels also. You may have also seen the snap together plastic models that are easy to put together and so on. The following is the result of the pattern with the circles smoothed:

Vector illustration. See how much simpler our pattern is and now look at the final result:

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Cut along the dotted lines.

Vector illustration. Again, I colored the pattern and gave it the same treatment I gave the other with the low polygonal faces but notice that the gluing tabs are small along the edge of the large vertical rectangle (small vertically in this case, horizontally they could be longer if you feel like they should be) so you can see that you do not make the gluing tabs always large when they are against a straight edge because here it is only a straight edge before you assemble it but this one is going to become a curved surface and it needs small gluing tabs, so know that it depends on it getting used for straight edges or for curved edges tridimensionally and in this case the gluing tabs are going to be glued to the the curved edges of the circles. Another option was to put the gluing tabs around the circles. Now this was for a curve that is circular and the vertexes are always outside the smooth circular line and the segments are always inside but what if the curve is one that changes direction like the following one?:
Vertexes outside of shape

Middle Point (Point of Vertex Change)

Vertexes inside of shape

Vector illustration.

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Don't worry about it as you can see there is just a point in the middle where the vertexes and segments will invert, don't get confused, the red line just stays in the middle of the black lines, just do your best and try to draw the smooth curve as close as possible to the segmented one. Take a close look along the red line in the curved part and you will see the same thing you saw in the previous example of the red circles. I have to clear one important point in this, when you do see the smooth red lines in close up and you see them so perfectly in between the vertexes and the segments it doesn't mean that you have to draw it that perfectly, you don't, you don't have to be a robot, those up there are just hypothetical examples to demonstrate the basic idea that when you draw a smoothed line over the old segmented one you won't damage the model or damage its precision because like I said before what you are doing is averaging the values of their measures and the part will come out all right and the margin of error is minimal. If you created the original 3D figure with enough faces it will be all right. When you draw over the straight segments of the old lines you just do it in a similar way to the way you trace over a bitmap image a vector pattern (artists sometimes load a bitmap image in an illustration program that could be for example a hand drawing that was scanned to trace vector lines over it), the difference here is that when you draw vector lines over a bitmap image it's most of the time for artistic purposes and in that case you can be more loose as artistic work usually is so it doesn't look mechanical but in a paper model you have to try to do it a little bit more perfect and follow the line as close as possible for the model edges but it doesn't have to be as perfect as I drew it in our hypothetical example (well, not as perfect as I wanted for the hypothetical example cause Open Office Draw is not as precise as CorelDraw X3). Just try it and build a prototype part and you will see that your model parts will assemble right more often than not and if they don't you will usually need to do only very small corrections. Next, see the smooth red line that I obtained by drawing over our previous pattern:

The next thing I'll show you will be something that looks kinda the opposite of what I've just explained. I told you that you can smooth a segmented shape like the original curve that was really made of several straight segments over which I drew a smoother curve but there is another simpler way to create a smooth curve. Another way to create a smooth curve is by not applying the smooth curve to it at all, Huh? What are you saying? Well what you do is to create the curve with a very high number of straight segments but first take a look at the previous image which is a screenshot of the smooth red curve that I did before but this one shows the nodes that define its shape. These nodes are points that you handle in illustration programs in order to change the shape that they make. In illustration software when you use the editing functions of the nodes, handles appear connected to these points (depending on it being a curve or a straight line and the illustration software) and these handles then allow you to Page 116

produce such changes. In the previous image I didn't show those handles, I merely showed those nodes so you can see how simple they are, how with a very low number of nodes I was able to reproduce the curve fairly well. Observe in the next example how I merely used the Create Boundary function of CorelDraw to create an outline so notice that I didn't draw a smooth curve over the original imported pattern as in the previous image. The next screenshot is a picture of the outline created by the Create Boundary tool but now I'm showing its nodes:

You see, in the picture before this last one there were only a few nodes but the two top segments were true curve segments (you can set segments between nodes to be straight or curved lines in illustration software) and in the previous picture there are a lot more nodes but the lines that connect those nodes are all straight segments, in this last picture all the segments of the shape are straight lines. Notice how despite that, the curve in the last picture looks relatively smooth anyway already and that is because despite the segments being straight lines the number of those segments is relatively high and that makes the curve relatively smooth despite the straight lines. So what do you do to smooth it better? Easy, you just bump the number of polygons of your original 3D shape up even more so when you unfold the 3D shape and you convert it to an outline (if it isn't an outline already like what you obtain with the 179 degree trick of the B-Paperizer script) you obtain a pattern that has a pretty high number of nodes. The next picture is a screenshot that shows a circle made in such a way and it's showing the high number of nodes that it has:

But take a look at the same circle in vector lines (not a screenshot) without showing the nodes: Page 117

Vector illustration. See how relatively smooth it is? This circle came from a cylinder that had 80 sides so it has 80 segments but it can have more. More? But it looks pretty round to me already Well if you zoom in you may start to notice the straight segments but that just happens when you use it for a large object in your model sheets because as you enlarge it the straight line segments enlarge with it too but if you use it for a very small circle it will look very smooth when printed. So, like I said you can use a higher number of faces for large ones, maybe 100 sides for your cylinder or perhaps 128 and maybe 48 or 36 for small cylinders but if those numbers appear too high for you then you might decide to use lower values for your taste. Yes, again we are dealing with a margin of error here but as you may have deducted already that's all relative because as you increase your polygonal resolution this margin of error or imprecision becomes less and less until it becomes insignificant cause at some point in increasing the number of polygons that comprise your 3D shape this error will disappear in the real physical universe when it's time to cut the cardboard. You have to determine yourself what that amount of polygons will be depending on several things like the size of your shape, the level of quality that you want your model to have, how complex or simple you want your model to be, etc. You also have to determine how many polygons are necessary for you to create unfolded patterns that are good enough to trace a smooth curve over them like in the first examples of the red lines if you decide to use that method instead. So why these two different methods of creating smooth curves? Because they both have advantages and disadvantages, the first method, the method of the real curved lines is harder to do but yields a better result, it gives less trouble when scaling the model up (when making the model larger) so it preserves scalability better and it also creates smaller file sizes because of the low number of nodes that it utilizes, the second method creates faster results but a larger file size and a bit less scalability but these last two things are again relative and in many, many cases they may be insignificant because first the file size may still be relatively low or low enough even with a high number of nodes because vector artwork has a tendency to be very efficient in file size despite this and the scalability may also become insignificant because how high is a model builder going to scale a paper model up? After a certain size it may become problematic for some models because the internal structure was not designed for some very large sizes or like in the case of most models it may not even have one that it would have needed if it was designed for a very large size and also how many modelers do you know that have access to printers that could allow them to enlarge the model to a proportion that would start to cause trouble? And in addition the number of model builders that do that is relatively low, now, they do exist and if you want to, you can provide them with the courtesy of a well drawn Page 118

curve, it's up to you. Another thing to consider is that the first method maybe better for those people that have chosen a very high poly part but that do not posses a similar function to CorelDraw X3's Create Boundary because the Create Boundary function makes it very easy to do an outline of the shape but with other programs you may have to use tools similar to Corel's Weld function (Illustrator's Pathfinder Tools, Inkscape's Union or similar) which can do a good job but with some very high poly shapes it can get tricky sometimes. In that case it may be easier to do the manual smoothing of the shape with the first method instead. If you want your model to be neater and smoother then smooth the curves as I've shown you in the red lines examples, If you are happy with the quality of the second method use it, don't underestimate the second method because I said all that, used properly it can give very, very good results too. As you can see, what I did was to show you the two methods so you could choose the one that suits you best, I just gave you a choice, practice with both and pick the one that you like best, I personally prefer the smooth real curves method because I like models with great quality and that's the one that produces the best quality of the two, but that's my choice. Do you remember what I mentioned at the beginning of this document about the manual drafting techniques that can be used to create unfolded surfaces? Many of those methods are also dependent on the number of segments that you draw. Many of those methods use a discreet number of divisions that you measure and project in order to obtain an unfolded shape. What I want to point out here is that in a similar way to the way you create a relatively high number of polygons and then you create later on your illustration or drawing program a smoothed curve the same thing happens on those methods, the higher the divisions that you use to create your developed (unfolded) surface, the more accurate your final curve will be but in drafting if you increase that number too high it may become way too laborious to create the unfolded pattern so the number of divisions that you use have kind of a lower usable limit. It's just much easier to increase the number of polygons in 3D software and then use an unfolder. Old unfolders that used manual methods also smoothed the curved lines after creating their patterns when doing surface development, you won't see it in the next example. The segment lines are all straight because I simplified the drawing for the sake of illustrating the concept but if you take a look at many surface development drawings on the Internet (like those of the technical drawing book that I mentioned at the beginning of this book) you will notice their edge lines already smoothed and curved for things that have rounded surfaces such as a cone and for many others.

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Observe in this illustration of developing a cone the number of divisions used to do it, it could be a little more, that's entirely up to the designer to decide what is the adequate number. By the way I unfolded that manually and I test assembled a printed prototype and it worked just fine but it's so time consuming to draw! You have to take so many measures! Wow, what paper model designers and engineers of yesterday had to go through! Well, it did work. Now I will explain the use of that special button in the Blender B-Paperizer script that I told you about when I first started to explain the functions of the B-Paperizer buttons in the section titled The Blender Unfolding Scripts Controls in chapter 2. I'm talking about the Edge gener. (Edge generate) button together with the NET slider. The reason that I told you that I was going to explain the function of this button and this slider better in this section is because the functionality of that button together with the NET slider is absolutely related to smoothing a flattened pattern as I explained here and now that I explained all this better it can be much easier for you to see what you use this button and slider for. Notice that this button and slider can produce an outline pattern that doesn't have the inner divisions and therefore what that does in effect is to smooth the flattened pattern in a similar way to what I showed you in the second smoothing method, the one in which you leave the segment lines straight but with a relatively high number of segments so the curves look relatively smooth. Remember what I told you on that section back there on chapter 2 that when the button is toggled on the slider determines the threshold of which inner divisions will be included or not on the outline pattern based on the angles of the adjacent faces to one another and what that does effectively is to create an outline pattern of the second smoothing method type. You know now that there are two different smoothing methods and now you know that this built-in functionality of the B-Paperizer script belongs to the second one. If you want your outline pattern to be cleaner with less lines you decrease the value of the slider to a lower angle number until you are happy with the result or you increase it if you feel that some fold lines in particular should be included. Notice here that this is an instance in which the 179 degrees B-Paperizer trick previously described can comes into play. This extra functionality is good news for people that use illustration programs other than CorelDraw like Inkscape for example cause Page 120

they lack the Create Boundary function equivalent and even if they can use tools similar to Corel's Weld function (Illustrator's Pathfinder Tools, Inkscape's Union or similar) if they do run into trouble with that they can use B-Paperizer built-in smoothing functionality. This is also good news for people that use bitmap editors instead of vector illustration programs for their final work cause they do not have to worry about erasing inner lines so B-Paperizer will help a lot in those cases. But why don't we use that functionality in the first place? Because I wanted to show you the different methods or alternatives so you decide which one you like the best. I wanted to show you too the ones that involve illustration programs in case you do not decide to use Blender cause that functionality is particular of the B-Paperizer script and if you use a different 3D software other than Blender to create your paper models you can then have the alternative of smoothing the patterns outside in your favorite illustration program or 2D CAD software and besides the smoothing method that you have with B-Paperizer belongs only to one of the two methods available for smoothing as I showed you already. Combined High Polygons And Low Polygons Sometimes you can combine high and low poly in some parts of certain geometrical shapes such as the following (hey that almost looks like a Mac Mini computer):

Take a look at the walls of that figure in next picture in which I highlighted the low poly sections of the wall:

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You can also see that the top is a combined low poly and high poly, so sometimes you can have this type of figure that is a combined high poly for the curves and just simple polygons for the flat parts. See that I just marked the seams for the Unfold script:

And this is the pattern that it created, nice and neat:

So sometimes when you model keep this in mind, if you can put it to use then do so cause the part Page 122

will be simpler to unfold later on. The Subsurface Division Problem Along this line of creating a high number of polygons in one direction and a lower one in the other there are some obstacles such as if you try to use for example a subsurface divider function that is quite popular today in many, many 3D programs. Many modern 3D software programs have the ability to take a model with a lower polygonal number and apply a subsurface divider to it, and what that subsurface divider does is that it takes a lower poly resolution model and adds many more divisions and smooths the lower poly boxy model and creates a rounder model with it while still preserving the original lower polygon model underneath and together with it. The following picture shows a simple 3D shape without subsurface division:

And observe the same shape with a subsurface divider applied to it:

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See how the basic boxy shape is still there and how you can see both the simple low polygonal model and the smoother (higher resolution) subsurface divided model? If you manipulate the lower polygon model the other one will change accordingly. The problem with this is that subdivided models are high polygon in both directions at the same time. If there was a subsurface divider that could, let's say, subdivide in only one direction specified in high polygons but left the other direction in low polygon then it could be good for paper modeling (maybe, if it was possible at all) cause you could give an object a high number of polygons in one direction and a lower one in the other and you could create smoothed patterns by later on applying the tricks I mentioned before so the use of a subsurface divider may not be such a good idea for paper modeling but I'm not going to say that it's impossible, I haven't tried to use it for such a purpose to see if there is any methodology for paper model design that can be derived from it, I won't underestimate the capability of 3D modelers, cause some of them are quite resourceful and at one moment or another somebody could come up with some tricks on how to use it for such as purpose, I myself have not have the time to experiment that much with it for paper modeling so I cannot say. I did try a little and the results were not really good so I don't use it. Of course, you can for example create a high polygon model using subsurface division techniques (subsurface divider) and then apply some polygon reducer to it because as you can see in the very smooth picture the shape that you generate with subsurface division is very different to the original boxy shape and you may want that new shape as a paper model anyway. So you may decide to compromise and simply create a low polygon or medium polygon version of that shape afterward with a low poly modeling technique manual method in the 3D video game way or the low poly in one direction only paper model way but manually (depending of the type of model), not using the subsurface divider for the final model, maybe only using it as a reference model that you will recreate in a low poly version.

Now, in the example above what I did was to take that basic boxy shape that I had and beveled it once (most if not all serious 3D graphic applications have the capability to bevel the edges of 3D models) to make sort of a low poly version of that figure and this can be easily converted into a paper model but this is just another way to do it. In Blender you select an object, enter Edit Mode (Tab) then select a few edges (in this case I selected all the object's edges with the A key) and after that press the W key and select Bevel to use this function then you drag the mouse to adjust the bevel amount and left click when you are satisfied with the results. Take a look then to the next example:

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See, what I just did was to bevel it again to get the edges even smoother and as you can see it starts to approach the look of the subdivided figure better but remember that it's more complex to unfold and to create a paper model out of it but the decision is up to you and this is a simple way to create a low poly model of that particular figure but this is kind of a regular geometric figure and for more complex things such as characters you may have to use other low polygon modeling methods and there are several and you can find many tutorials for that in the web for a lot of 3D modeling programs. Low Polygon In One Direction Only Tricks Even though subsurface division give us problems I will give you a few interesting tricks that I came up when I was thinking about how to subdivide things highly in only one direction for compound curves, there are probably other methods in addition to these ones but at least I'll give you a few ones and the next one will work in bodies of revolution and that means in shapes that are basically circular and symmetrical around one axis and that you create by spinning a silhouette. I will show a Blender example but this function is available in many 3D programs, I'll say in most of them so the procedure for other software may be a bit different but the principle is the same. First I created a Bezier Curve* (this is the same type of curve with manipulating handles as those in illustration software) with half of the outer silhouette of a goblet:

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As you can see that the curve is still editable and I'm going to convert it to a Mesh object (Alt+C) but first you should make a copy of the Bezier Curve in case you want to edit it further after creating your object and you are not satisfied with the shape. You can make a copy and put it in another layer as a safeguard. Now, the next thing before converting it into a mesh of vertexes and segments is to make sure that we have a high resolution in the curve before conversion and this is done in Blender in the Curve and Surface panel that appears after creating a Bezier Curve and then hitting the F9 key to bring the Editing Panels:

That number circled is the one that concern us (DefResolU:), it will specify the quality or number of segments that will represent the curve after it's converted to a mesh, in other words it is the segment resolution of the curve. As you can see in this example I used a value of 32, you decide what's best for you but this number has to be relatively high because it will determine the high quality vertical resolution that we want for our demonstration. Most 3D programs will allow you to specify this number so you can adjust it and after that you can convert your curve into a mesh for spinning.

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As you can see I have converted the curve to a mesh object with a fairly high number of vertexes and segments. In addition to that I have aligned the 3D cursor of Blender to the last vertex at the bottom, the one that will be the middle point for the rotation cause I will use the Spin function to create a solid that will be spun using the 3D cursor as the rotation point along the Z axis (in this case it's the blue arrow that you see the vertical axis). After the shape is ready to be spun let's take a look at the panel where you specify the Spin parameters:

Look below the word Extrude, the button that concerns us for this exercise is the Spin button, this is the button that will asks us which shape we want to spin but look at the numbers below that row of buttons that contain the Spin button, the first one is the number of degrees of the total spin (Degr:), in this case I selected 360 degrees because I wanted a complete revolution and the second is the number of Steps of that Spin and notice that I set it to a low 6, normally most people will probably select a much higher number to create a very smooth 3D model but I want the opposite because I want a low polygonal resolution horizontally, see, now by specifying 32 as the value of the curve before converting it to a mesh I obtained a high poly resolution vertically but by specifying a low number in the Spin Page 127

segments I obtained a low poly resolution horizontally and this is the result after smoothing the curves with the curves smoothing techniques already mentioned:

You will see that it's the case of the beach ball again but with the shape of a goblet, and just like in that example this goblet has 6 sides but it can be made with 8 sides or more if you wish:

Notice that the goblet is smoother yet as in the case of the 8 side beach ball and also notice the section of faces that I duplicated and separated from the main goblet model and that is the only thing in this case that needs unfolding and then smoothing which will give you this result:

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Vector illustration. That red figure is the smoothed result of unfolding the section that I separated from the goblet and drawing smooth curves over it like in previous occasions, all that you need now is to copy it 7 more times and place them side by side and you have your pattern. After you have the pattern you would of course add gluing tabs, coloring, textures, etc. When you add gluing tabs you will have to do them in small sizes (along the direction of the curve) because it's mostly curves and the only exception in this shape would be the triangular bottom which forms the circular base of the goblet when assembled, you could put a longer tab there and in this case too it would only need the tabs on one side of this shape for all the copies. Another thing that I want you to notice here is the orientation, realize that the vertical orientation of the compound curves is virtually mandatory because we are spinning the curve vertically so we obtain a vertical orientation because in this particular example it is the way that is going to be. In the spinning method, your compound curves orientation will be the same orientation of the axis used to create the spin. I have to mention that in relation to the low poly horizontal resolution you could go the opposite way, you could specify a low number of segments for your curve and specify a high number of segments for the spin and that would mean that instead of 6 or 8 sides in the spin you could have 50 or 100 and of course a much lower number than 32 for the original curve and by doing this you flip the low poly method from the horizontal to the vertical. In addition to that you can draw a low poly curve but not in the strictest sense of the word and what I mean by that is that a curve object in Blender (a Bezier object) can contain straight lines in addition to curves like in many illustration programs and many other 3D programs and you see that you can draw a square or a hexagon with a curve object and it won't matter how many segments you assign to such a curve because it would remain straight, it won't matter if it is 32 like I did or 200 it would still be straight and it would generate Page 129

a simple mesh with vertexes in the corners only in the same positions where the nodes (the control points) were in the Bezier object made of straight segments. Let's take a look at such an example:

So you see, it's still a curve object but it's comprised of straight segments, if we convert this to a mesh object and spin it in the center (the 3D cursor position in Blender) we give it a high number of spin segments to obtain something like this:

Realize that by creating a curve with straight lines you created effectively a low vertical polygonal resolution object but gave it a high number of horizontal segments. In reality you didn't need to draw it with a curve, given the fact that it's a simple straight segments shape it could have been done directly as a mesh by extruding vertexes which is something that any serious 3D software can do rather easily. So you can do it either of both ways for something that will be spun and will have a straight shape like that, by drawing a curve object with straight segments and then converting it to a mesh or by drawing it as a mesh directly. Is good to know that it can be done both ways cause it's possible that some 3D programs use curves instead of meshes for spinning. I really gave it kind of a very low vertical resolution, it could have a slightly higher resolution vertically (a few more divisions) to represent the shape of the goblet a bit better but this is to show you more clearly the change of direction and a Page 130

designer could prefer a simpler model just like that. Now, take a good look at that last picture and notice that in reality what you end up having is basically a bunch of cones and cylinders and just a circle for the bottom, some of your basic elements of paper modeling, it's not always like that of course, there are far more complex or irregular shapes but by now you probably are starting to have a pretty good idea of the basics that you need to know to create 3D paper models. In other 3D programs creating a spin object like that could be different but the basics are the same and you will be able to use the fundamentals that you learned here to do this in most 3D software. The difference in the way I created the smooth spheres to what I've just showed you is that I only used the preliminary parameters of the Sphere primitive to create the high poly spheres either horizontally or vertically, when I created the truncated cones sphere all I did was to specify a high number of horizontal Segments* (Segments - name of horizontal sections of the Sphere primitive in Blender, it could be any other name in any other software) as the parameter for the number of horizontal faces and a low number of vertical Rings* (Rings - name of the vertical sections of the Sphere primitive in Blender) and that created that sphere. To create the other beach ball type sphere I did the opposite, I gave it a low number of horizontal Segments (6 or 8) and I gave it a high number of vertical Rings and then I separated a section like I did in the goblet and drew a smooth outline over that oval like pattern and replicated the sides 6 or 8 times (depending on the modeled sphere) in my illustration software and that created that other sphere. Other primitives may allow you to do similar things, the Torus (the donut) allows you to specify the vertical and horizontal resolution and for the Cylinder and Cone primitives it's easier cause they only curve in one direction and you can specify how many of those polygons you want. Using Path Extrusion Again, along the line of this high poly resolution in one direction I realized another thing that can be used to model like that and that is the Extrude Along Path function. Extrusion* is basically to pull a shape to give it depth. If you take a flat shape and extrude (pull) it you get a 3D model, observe:

The starting shape doesn't necessarily have to be a flat shape, it can be other things not so flat but here we used a flat shape for simplicity and for demonstration purposes. To extrude in Blender you select your vertexes, edges or faces and press the E key, select how or what you want to extrude in the menu that appears, drag the mouse and left click when done. You can limit it to any one of the 3 axes (X,Y or Z) by clicking one of those 3 respective keys (again X,Y or Z) before dragging the mouse. That is a flat pentagon seen at an angle from the camera and now we extrude it backwards: Page 131

This is another one of those functions that any serious 3D modeling or 3D CAD software has and is used constantly by 3D artists and engineers. I explained that so you understand another type of extrusion that many 3D programs offer and that is to Extrude along a path. What that does is to extrude a shape while following a Path (for example a curve but not necessarily so cause it can contain straight segments too that you draw as I said before). Let's observe a pentagon extruded along a curved path:

What I did for the model above was to draw a Blender Bezier Curve with straight lines forming a pentagon in Blender (in Blender you could use a straight line Path too but to do that you have to give it a value of 1 in the DefResolU: parameter for it to have straight lines and it's kinda harder to do because the straight lines corners do not coincide with the Control Points so for the straight lines curve that form the pentagon it is better to use a Bezier Curve with its segments converted all to straight lines and to do that you select its Control Points and then pres the V key while in Edit Mode) and to extrude that shape along another curved object that did have real curves (a Path or a Bezier Curve) but giving that second curved path a high number of segments and the low poly in this case would come from the flat sided pentagon, afterward I made a duplicate and turned the whole object into a mesh. To extrude along a path in Blender you have to obtain the name that you gave the curve shape to be extruded (in this case the pentagon) and by default Blender give the name Curve to the first Bezier Curve inserted into the scene but if it has a different name you can see it by pressing the N key over a 3D View window to bring the Transform Properties panel (and you can give it any name that you Page 132

want right there in the OB: input box, you can call it pentagon for this example) and then you select the second curve that will be used for the extrusion and write the name of the previous curve (pentagon) in the field labeled Bev Ob: in the Curve and Surface panel (you can see this panel in the picture that is 6 pages back) for that second curve (while the second curve is selected). After you input the name of the curve to be extruded in that input box it will take the first curve object that you created (the flat sided pentagon) and extrude it along the shape of the second curve that you will use as a guiding path. In a case like this you have to unfold every one of the sides because they are all different being careful not to get those shapes mixed up if you separate every one of them and the next step would be the smoothing in the illustration program, etc. Again, in this method just like in the others it's possible to invert it by creating a smooth curved shape (the one to be used instead of the pentagon of the previous example) with a high number of segments but assigning a low number of segments to the extrusion path curve, for the following example I used a smooth Bezier Circle as the initial shape to be extruded and if you do that you'll get something like this:

See?, in this instance we have flipped the low poly resolution to the Path or Bezier Curve used to guide the extrusion and created the high poly resolution as the very smooth shape (in this case a circle with a high number of segments) that is going to be extruded. Now the best way to unfold this is probably to separate each one of those pipe segments and to unfold them individually to arrange the whole thing in your illustration software. You have to be careful with how you arrange the parts, how you put it together again, that part is a bit hard sometimes but it's doable, you just have to be careful (ahead I'll show you a trick to help with that) with the placement of the parts again in the illustration software and you have to do it before you smooth the curves because you have to match the sides of some of the polygons to the sides of some other polygons and you have to determine which are the correct polygon sides or segments that match with each other. Go back to the very first object that I smoothed which was the 48 sides cylinder and take a look at it before I smoothed it, take a look at the pattern after it was rearranged but before I created the two smooth red circles, zoom in to the part where the segmented circles join the rectangle and you will see that they are joined at one of the straight sides of one the polygons contained in both figures. I could have joined the circles to the rectangle differently in this case. I could have chosen to put the circle at the bottom of the rectangle and have the rectangle go around the whole circle but that can be done because it's a more regular part like a cylinder but for many, many parts specially more irregular ones you may not have that choice and you may be able to join them correctly only in one specific place, after that, after you get the correct position then you will be able to draw you smooth shapes over. The example above is something that could be used to make for example a motorcycle muffler like those motorcycles paper models in the Page 133

Yamaha paper craft web site or many other things. If you take some of those vertex circles and scale them up or down you may come with a lot of useful shapes, take a look:

And it would look like this:

You see, that can be parts of a muffler or the legs or arms of a robot or of a character or something else, there is a lot that you can do just with that and it's still very unfoldable and doable for a paper model. Exceptions To The High Poly Modeling Techniques There are some exceptions to the high poly modeling techniques. You won't always use high poly, there are parts of a model that need to be low polygon because in real life they are low polygon geometric figures and after all this is entirely up to you. Low poly is also used in children models as I said before because they are usually designed in a simplified way for the sake of ease of assembly, despite that, there could be parts in a children model that could benefit from a little bit of high poly in one direction like cylinders, cones, etc. Look at the following example in which I used a regular low poly technique in both directions:

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That model is one I designed for my niece, for a school project she had about fungi. The project was a book that was supposed to be read by children so I designed a very simple model as a bonus for the project and this model was in a CD that I put in a CD envelope and glued to the interior of the back cover of the book with some additional bonus things (in a similar way to some real books) and I designed this model in a regular low poly way because most of the time it is best for kids. The model in the previous picture is 8 sided horizontally and you can see the vertical divisions clearly too. Now look at what would happen if I applied some of the high poly in one direction techniques that we have learned so far to the same small diorama:

This one is high poly vertically and 10 sides horizontally, some children can still assemble it but all the edges are curves and it could be too difficult for many others so it may be better for more adult persons. What I did was to create a curve with half the silhouette of the mushroom, gave a high number of divisions to this curve (the DefResolU: parameter in Blender), duplicated the curve for backup and converted it into a mesh that I spun 1 time (in Blender Degr: 360) with 10 divisions or sides (Steps in Blender). Look what else could have been done to this:

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I used something in Blender called Proportional Edit Falloff which allows you to manipulate many vertexes by selecting one or a few and influencing the nearby vertexes to a higher or lower degree depending on how close the adjacent vertexes are to the selected ones, so for example I turned the Proportional Edit Falloff on, selected which type of Falloff effect (Blender has several), selected the top central vertex of a mushroom and after clicking on a vertex you can scroll the mouse wheel to change the spherical diameter of influence while you still hold the mouse button down and after I selected a fairly large sphere of influence (you can see a circular line in the 3D window around the cursor changing size as you scroll the mouse wheel) I moved that top vertex off-center and then I changed to the rotation mode (Rotate manipulator mode Ctrl+Alt+R) and rotated the vertex a little. The closer the adjacent vertexes are to the selected vertex or vertexes the more they are changed.

In the screen above you can see the activation of the Proportional Edit Falloff in Blender and in the red square insert you can see the selection of the type of Falloff. That's how I twisted the mushrooms in the third example. There are other ways in Blender to twist a mesh like that but at least I gave an example to make you see what's involved and how it is related to paper modeling. Other 3D software may accomplish such a twisting in different ways, programs like 3D Studio Max, Maya and many others have modifiers that can be applied to objects to do many things and change those modifications easily afterward, and many other ways, Blender itself has been acquiring several modifiers lately (and it's still growing fast in that area) but programs of the caliber of 3D Studio Max Page 136

still have many more and they are more powerful at the moment but the bottom line is that this can be accomplished in many 3D software packages in different ways. See that by doing that the mushrooms may look a bit more artistic (if that's what the artist intended) but it becomes more difficult to unfold and to rearrange for the designer and harder to assemble for the model builder (but I will show you a trick to help with that ahead in the next section), it's up to you to decide if you want to proceed with it if you like your model better like that. Remember too that the mushrooms could have been done in reverse, high poly horizontally and low poly vertically like before with other examples I gave you. In the Canon web site, in their paper craft place there is a section called Craftown that is for children which contain many models that are simpler than their regular models and are more appropriate for little kids or for beginners. You can take a look in there to see more examples of how models for children are designed. The address for their paper craft web page is given a few paragraphs ahead in this document (approximately 2 pages ahead). If you want to you can download the mushrooms paper model at a Mediafire folder that I have shared for the public, one of the places where I put my paper models and a few other goodies like a few tutorials, wallpapers, etc. I created it recently and I was putting free stuff in there at the moment of writing this. The place is here: http://www.mediafire.com/? sharekey=bef98dda6119ec7a1bee9a6e9edd9c763226eac23d9aef9ab8eada0a1ae8665a Another place where you can download the mushrooms paper model and some other things that I did is here: http://pixeloz.deviantart.com/ Just press the Gallery button to see everything that I have put there. A Little More On How To Separate Some Parts I showed you that twisted mushroom up there so let's do something similar, let's suppose we are going to create an irregular part so as a starting point we use our sphere again but with higher vertical poly res and I will show you a little problem that sometimes arises when doing some type of irregular geometry in a moment so let's start with this:

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And now I used precisely the Proportional Edit Falloff to turn our regular model into a less regular one so I displaced it in this or the other way:

We will use the B-Paperizer script for this because in high poly res irregular geometry such as in the previous example this script will gives us far less trouble than the Unfold script as a general rule. So we separate it in sections to unfold it:

But how do we determine how it should be separated? In this case we simply follow the path of the high polygon direction as indicated in the next picture by the blue arrows, that's usually the best approach and if you go back and take a look at many of the separating and unfolding examples that I have been giving you you will find that tendency many times:

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OK so we did that and we unfolded it but look at what happens after we unfold all these sections:

Oh, oh! This looks like a tree shedding leaves at Fall! In irregular shapes like these sometimes the sections of the 3D model can become a convoluted mess when flattened and it may be hard to tell one section from the other and what side of each is which! So what do we do to organize this properly? Sometimes trying to put this back together can be a headache. I came up with a little trick that allows me to know much better which side is which and which part is which and how they go together and I will share it with you. It's a wee bit slow but it works very well. What I do is that I go near one of the points of these shapes before unfolding and create little polygonal shapes with segment and vertex extrusions with distinctive shapes that I use as I guide to put the parts together back again afterward in either the 3D software itself or in my illustration program:

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So here you see how we went back to our sections before unfolding them and went one by one and modeled distinctive shapes to the side of them such as a square that ends in a triangle, and a cross that ends in a triangle, a triangle, a square, a cross that ends as a square, a square that ends in a trapezoid, etc. Also notice that because we are using here the B-Paperizer script and because in this particular occasion I had already converted the quad polygons into triangles for the whole section I had to remember to take the newly created quads, select them and then convert them into triangles too but to avoid that you can add these new shapes to the section before converting the whole thing to triangles and then select everything which would include these new shapes and after that convert it to triangles. Observe in the next picture how I have modeled by edge and vertex extrusion some very simple shapes but that are different enough to tell our parts apart after unfolding:

In that last picture I am finishing the last shape by moving a vertex to form a triangle and you can see all the different mini shapes that I modeled into each section. You can tell there that one of those mini shape matches with another mini shape in the next adjacent section of our 3D model part. After that we can proceed to select one whole segment side to designate it as our cutting edge because sometimes B-Paperizer works better like that, the blue arrow only points to the white line which is just the active selected segment which at the moment is also part of our selection:

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After we unfold all the sections again we can arrange them easily by matching together the similar shapes, observe how I am rotating the last one into position:

Now I exported the pattern as a SVG file through B-Paperizer and then of course imported the SVG into CorelDraw X3. After that what you do is to delete those little shapes that you made to align and organize the sections correctly because you will no longer need them (you could do it as you arrange the parts if you prefer it that way). In the following image you will be able to see that I already removed them and that I also arranged the parts already into the final position and I did it rather easily of course with the you know what, the Dynamic Guides. It's important to remember that you should rearrange the parts into their proper positions before creating any kind of outline shape (in the case of CorelDraw X3 with the Create Boundary tool) or worst, before drawing a smooth true curved outline over the sections because at this stage the sections still retain their straight edges and the polygonal divisions which makes it much easier to arrange the parts by matching straight segments to straight segments (you may have to zoom in a bit because the high polygonal resolution make those straight segments small but it works the same). After converting all the sections to a boundary it's much harder to do this even if they still have straight edges because you no longer have the inner polygonal divisions and after converting them to smooth true curves (if you choose that option) it's extremely difficult or next to impossible sometimes so arrange the parts first. If you use the Create Boundary tool you have to create a boundary for each section one by one (each leaf shaped section) because if you try to create the boundary for all the sections by selecting Page 141

them all at the same time after they are together in the final position the Create Boundary tool will not create a complete and clean shape so create the boundaries for all the sections separately by selecting them one by one until you complete all the sections, then you can remove the underlying pattern (the one you imported) if you wish. See the final pattern arranged in our illustration program:

And of course the last picture I will show you is the final pattern but in this case I used the second method of smoothing (to use a high amount of straight segments) instead for simplicity purposes. The other thing missing here is the gluing tabs to complete the shape and after that of course it would be any artwork but here it is:

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Vector illustration. And that's all for that irregular shape. The important thing to learn from this so far is that paper models are not low polygon in the same way that old 3D video games models are, to recap, the main difference is that 3D game models can be low poly in both directions of a compound curve while paper models need to be low poly in only one direction in those areas with such surfaces, I was trying to clarify what was really the confusion related to this and I think that I was able to isolate this and explain it and also to provide some workable methods to deal with it and solve it. The techniques that I provide in this document to deal in 3D modeling with the compound curves problem aren't likely to be the only ones available to handle it, there will be other 3D techniques that will be useful for this purpose, like I said before, 3D modelers are resourceful and they will likely come up with other ideas on how to model compound curves but I believe that the basic principles that I explained about it can be applied to many of them and the important thing in my opinion is to understand that first, the techniques come later and I already gave here a few that can be useful for such a purpose and if you are a 3D modeler in another 3D program different from Blender you may have noticed that many of the things if not all of the things I explained here can be easily applied to many of those programs with relative ease. Once you grasp this one direction only high poly concept combined with smoothing you can be more able to create better models. Try it until you get it and you will see that it's really not that difficult to understand and you will also see that it will help you a lot to create models of higher quality. In the chapter that follows the next one (in chapter 6 - Designing Some Simple Models) I will give you a few other techniques to accomplish this as well.

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Chapter 5 - Internal Reinforcements Of 3D Paper Models

Most Common Internal Reinforcements

his is something that I've also seen some new designers getting a bit confused about at first, I have been reading on-line forums a lot and I have noticed that for some first time model designers it can be a bit confusing, so I decided to explain this a little bit to make it easier for them. Some people wonder what they are supposed to do with the internal reinforcement parts of a model and how does that work with unfolders. Some people wonder how does a program such as Pepakura or any other type of unfolder deals with the internal reinforcements that some models require to give them strength or a better more accurate shape. To begin with, not all models require internal reinforcements or internal shaping parts, reinforcements for those that require added strength are necessary usually because of a larger scale or size and in some models shaping parts are necessary for shaping the outer shell or hull like in the case of many sea ships and airplanes and other models. I've seen people wonder if something like Pepakura or any other unfolder automatically handles the internal reinforcements of models. The answer is yes and no, let me explain. It's not like something such as Pepakura is going to take those internal reinforcement parts and magically will turn them into separate parts and I don't think that any other paper unfolder will do that automatically either, what happens is that you the designer have to create these parts and separate them from the main model in a way similar to the way you separated other parts for the unfolding to work. If you look at some paper model airplanes you will see that many of those parts (in a lot of cases) are basically flat with some gluing tabs or other things added to them (I will show better examples of this ahead). In many airplanes, many times they are kinda oval like or a similar shape. I think for you to really understand this it's better that you have a look at some airplanes or sea ship models already designed in this fashion or even better assemble one or two of them if you can. Sometimes it's not that easy to decipher how they go together until you assemble some of them, if you have a lot of experience in assembling models already then good for you. What you have to realize is that those internal reinforcement parts have to be treated like a separate model, now, they don't always need to be 3D, many times they don't even need unfolding at all because in many occasions they are mostly flat like the internal ribs of an airplane fuselage that I was talking about or those inside a sea ship's hull, the internal ribs inside the wings of the airplane, etc., what happens is that you usually need to add the gluing tabs to them, or other pieces, I've seen some designers create some rectangular cardstock strips to form rings around those airplane ovals and you are supposed to glue that around them and then use these parts to glue the outer hull parts over them. In many instances you may not even need to unfold these things at all after designing them and all you will need to do is to export them to a PDF or to an illustration program or to a 2D CAD program just flat like that where you will rearrange them, add the gluing tabs and or adjust them to compensate for material thickness like I told you, smooth them (the smooth line traced over the straight segments), etc. If you were using the Unfold script of Blender to export to SVG and you don't want to unfold those things that are already flat just to save them to SVG format you may use the DXF export filters of Blender instead. When you open the DXF file generated by Blender in CorelDraw X3 or X4 you will see the Import AutoCAD File dialog box, in the second area were it reads Scaling: choose the second or third method (English or Metric), do not choose Automatic because it doesn't work with it, when you open the file you get nothing but if you choose any of the other two it works just fine. In Adobe Illustrator CS4 I couldn't open the file if it was saved with the Blender DXF option but if you use the AutoCAD DXF option to save it then the pattern opens just fine in it. I couldn't open the file with either choice in Inkscape but both opened just fine in DoubleCAD XT and Solid Edge 2D CAD Page 144

but remember that in Solid Edge 2D CAD you have to run the configuration wizard first to be able to open AutoCAD DXF files.

Vector illustration The previous illustration shows the internal flat reinforcements using the ring method around them to then join together the different sections of a Cessna 172 paper model fuselage surface. The model builder has to glue those strips that form the rings around the flat parts by using glue fillets, this is a little difficult so what I do as a model builder is that I cut a few strips of cardstock and cut a few small rectangles out of those strips and create 90 degrees angle brackets by folding those rectangles in half, then I glue some of those angle brackets to the flat parts and then glue the rings to the angle brackets then I apply glue fillets around after the brackets glue is dry enough and it's much easier to do it that way but that's why the gluing tabs method is better in my opinion, cause it's easier.

This is the full Cessna paper model when assembled. That particular one up there was assembled by me. The instructions of this model are in black and white in the web site but the model is in full color as you can see and you can save the instructions to PDF with CutePDF Writer. The instructions are in Slovenian but you can use the pictures and you can always use a tool like an on-line translator like the Google on-line translator which is nowhere near perfect but it's most definitely better than a language you know nothing about (if that is the case) and then save the translated page to a PDF. This is the link to the Google language tools page: Page 145

http://www.google.com/language_tools And what you do is that you take that link for the model page and copy and paste it into the Translate a web page box and in the first drop box below that one select Slovenian and in the second drop box to the right of that one select English (or whatever your favorite language is) and then click on the Translate button. This is the link to the page: http://www.tzs.si/revija_tim/1999_2000/Cessna_172/Cessna.htm On that page click in the link that says: Opis izdelave (means something like description of construction the instructions) and in the page that appears click on the hyperlink that says: Predloga (format PDF 370 kb) and Predloga means template. And this is the direct link to the file: Predloga (format PDF - 370 kb)

The generic example before uses the gluing tabs around the flat parts method instead and in my opinion this is a superior method because it's far easier to assemble for the model builder. Section A would be glued to another section at the front (the side that contains the tabs) and the gluing tabs are not folded yet in it. Section B would be glued to section A and it has the gluing tabs already folded. Section C is optional, it doesn't have tabs and it would be glued to section B if the designer wanted to add more strength to section B. Section D would be glued to section B (or to C if C was used) and it doesn't have the gluing tabs folded yet either. The four other parts in the back without letters are just a similar example with a different shape. The airplanes from the Canon web site use a method similar to this. You may want to take a look at such examples, if you do, study the assembly instructions carefully. That collection of free paper models is available in Canon's Creative Park web site at: http://cp.c-ij.com/en/index.html

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You can find the airplanes at the Paper Craft section in the Vehicles area. Material Thickness Compensation Material thickness compensation is sometimes necessary to compensate for cardstock thickness when designing paper models but because this is a small adjustment I do it by hand in CorelDraw and because this is not in all parts, just in some that when you assemble don't seem to fit right and start to wrinkle or refuse to close or fit together if you force them or try to glue them. This is only in a few parts and you will learn with time how to do this. Yes, this is necessary and it's the reason why you should build prototypes of your model to see if all the parts fit together well before publishing it, no, don't expect that because you created it in a computer and unfolded it perfectly everything will fit perfectly when you assemble it in the real world, in some cases particularly in simpler models it might work just fine but as a rule of thumb, the more complex the paper model gets, the more chances of getting a part or two that doesn't fit properly or a section of a part that doesn't close or fit together well so you have to adjust manually by increasing or decreasing the part's edge toward the outside or toward the inside respectively very slightly in the problematic areas. The process is not that difficult and it's usually necessary. If you consider yourself a professional designer you should go through this process. In some of those methods of creating internal parts and structures you have to be careful because these internal parts may need a little bit of adjustment (a little bit of reduction) to compensate for material thickness because of the fact that they go inside and if they use that technique of the rings over the edge of the flat parts they may need even more reduction (but this is still a very small amount because we are talking in relative terms here, when we talk about this type of reduction we could be talking hundreds of an inch or less). What you should be careful with is that if you do reduce the size of those parts in an illustration program you don't use the scale function because the scale function as many graphic artists know very well reduce shapes in the same proportion they were and that doesn't work for this purpose because when you scale things like that, one of the two measures (either the vertical or the horizontal) will have the proportions off. So what do you do to deal with this out of proportion problem? What you do to reduce a shape correctly is to use a function usually called contour or something similar, this is the tool that allows you to create an interior or exterior shape to the one you have selected that is smaller or larger but preserves the same distance to the inner or outer shape all around. In CorelDraw it's called Contour, and to reduce the part you have to give it an Inside Offset with a very small offset or to enlarge it you have to give it an Outside Offset. In Illustrator it's called an Offset Path and it is under the Object menu, select Path and then select Offset Path, in Xara Designer it is also called Contour (Ctrl+7) in the Tools menu, in Inkscape it's in the Path menu, the Inset (Ctrl+Left Parenthesis) and Outset (Ctrl+Right Parenthesis) functions but you have to adjust the amount for this in the Inkscape Preferences... item. In the File menu, you select Inkscape Preferences... or use the (Ctrl+Shift+P) key combination and in the dialog box that appears select Steps and it is the third item that appears from top to bottom (Inset/Outset by:) in the right pane of that window and you adjust this amount in px (pixels) but it has many decimal places (sub-pixel units). I also hope that the companies, groups or persons that produce illustration programs add the equivalent of Smart Guides or Dynamic Guides because they are incredibly useful for technical type drawings, they are badly needed and I have to say here that I'm a bit surprised that many programs that compete with CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator and Serif DrawPlus like Xara Designer or Canvas and others still don't offer this feature after it has been offered by CorelDraw and Illustrator for so many Page 147

years (CorelDraw has had it since version 12, just before X3), particularly for Xara Designer which has been a pioneer in many new features that other illustration programs have adopted later on, despite this Xara Designer has some good snapping functions that will help a bit in the rearrangement. Something like Smart Guides or Dynamic Guides is a function that should simply become standard in the illustration software field, I hope that in the future it does. Now observe this:

Vector illustration. The shape on the left is the shape that you want to reduce, the interior shape in the middle shows what happens when you try to scale to a smaller shape and the interior shape to the right was produced using the Contour function which is what you need to compensate for material thickness, of course for material thickness like that of cardstock it would be a much smaller amount of offset than in the illustration to the right, with practice you will get the right amount. If you are wondering if a program like CorelDraw is precise enough for such small measures, yes it is and CorelDraw's precision can be adjusted to be better than the way it's set by default, I have mine set to 4 decimal places and that would be to 10,000 of an inch which is more than enough for this purpose. In programs such as 2D CAD drafting programs or 3D CAD programs the precision is also very high because for engineering that high level of precision is needed. An Old Common Internal Reinforcement Trick If those flat internal reinforcement pieces intersect, if they go one through the other you can use the old cardboard box division trick, the trick that manufacturers use of intersecting pieces of cardboard to form an intermeshed part that is very strong and doesn't even have to be glued with itself because the parts are just inserted with one another and that is pretty firm. See the interior of the following box:

What you have to do is to glue such a structure to the exterior hull or shell of a ship or airplane or Page 148

any other similar model that requires it and you can accomplish that by adding gluing tabs to the edges of the parts that form that structure. I suggest that you take a look at the following parts of the generic display base I designed for other people's models, what I'm putting here is just some optional parts of that base cause the standard inner reinforcements have only 2 parts that are intermeshed inside and this is an optional set that you can use to make the base stronger which has 4 internal reinforcement pieces instead:

Middle Reinforcements A Refuerzos Centrales A

Middle Reinforcements B Refuerzos Centrales B

Vector illustration. Observe in the previous image the gluing tabs around the parts, now, you don't have to put that many, that was my choice in that design but in many designs it can be much less than that. The following diagram shows how those parts go inside the base:

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Middle Reinforcements A Refuerzos Centrales A

Middle Reinforcements B Refuerzos Centrales B

Vector illustration. The links for downloading this free display base are on page 220. Observe that all you need to do is to make those intermeshing pieces have the same external contour of your model and glue them to the exterior parts, to the shell. If you wish so or think it's necessary you can design them to be glued in some part close to the center or in more than one part and that can be accomplished with small pieces of cardboard, or by telling the modeler in the instructions to put glue fillets in some areas but you may not need this at all, the shape and structure of that type of internal system together with the strength of gluing it to the external hull or shell becomes quite sturdy. This trick is used by many paper models, I particularly noticed it mostly in sea ships but also in some airplanes and other models. 3D Internal Reinforcements If your internal reinforcement structure does need to be 3D instead of just flat pieces what you do is that you treat that internal 3D part as if it was another separate 3D model and then unfold it, do you see? That internal reinforcement can be pretty much like a model within the model (like those Russian babushka dolls that come one inside the other) and what you do is to treat it as such and process it through your unfolder, be that unfolder an internal one in your 3D application of choice or be that unfolder something external like Pepakura, you just unfold that other interior model like if it was a separate one, sort of the way a character model has a shield or a gun that you have to unfold separately, so for a 3D internal structure, same thing. The one thing that you need is for those parts to correlate with the shape and measures of the outer skin or hull to which they belong and then you can separate them from the 3D model they were created in and unfold them (you could place them in another layer so they retain their exact position for any additional editing that you may have to do later). This is the same thing that you may need to do with other parts of your model on the outside, you need to separate them before unfolding. When you design your 3D paper model you have to take that into account and design the internal reinforcements with that in mind from the get-go, it's really not that difficult to do, it's just part of the paper model design process and with time you will understand it better. This is a simple illustration that gives you an idea Page 150

of this, the outer shell has been made transparent with light edges so you see the two together better:

See the yellow internal reinforcement object that will be glued to the blue outer one and notice that it really is another 3D paper model that just needs to be unfolded just like the outer one so in this case you would unfold the outer blue box and then you would unfold the yellow 3D internal reinforcement structure and if you were the builder you would assemble and glue the yellow internal structure object and then assemble the outer blue object but you would leave one of the sides open, probably one of the long vertical sides so you could insert the yellow object inside and glue it and then you would close the blue box completely, do you see? These 3D internal reinforcements are not common, if you examine most paper models that contain internal reinforcements they use the other methods described here because of the simplicity so overall I recommend those better but if your model is an exception for whatever the reasons you may have now a better idea of how to do this and in mechanical models, those that use some sort of mechanism, a lever or something of the sort to give the model some type of motion like those that have a dancing clown or the like, well, you will use a similar methodology of construction as that used for models that have 3D internal reinforcements, you would treat these inner mechanical parts as separate models that need unfolding too. Model Interiors Another thing you may have to handle is the internal parts of a model such as the interior of the cockpit of an airplane or the interior of a car (this is optional of course) and the concept for this is very simple, as you may have guessed it already, you just handle those interior parts in a similar way to the way you handle those interior 3D reinforcements. What you do is to treat those parts as another model within the model, same thing, and again you have to keep a correlation of those parts with the outside parts just like with the internal reinforcements. Take a look at how I created the canopy of the next model airplane in the next section and you could use that same edge that forms the hole for the canopy and extrude that downward toward the inside and create a bathtub with the shape that you want and create all the additional details that go there like the seat(s) and/or a pilot or pilots etc. Of course these things would be treated like other models and unfolded in the same way.

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Chapter 6 - Designing Some Simple Models

Designing A Simple Cartoon Paper Model Airplane

et's take a quick look at building a simple cartoon model airplane to see how to do the internal parts better but remember that this is very simplified cause I'm not trying to teach you 3D modeling here but only to make you grasp better the subject of the internal reinforcements and to show you examples of low poly in one direction in a real model:

Notice that the basic fuselage in this case is just a cylinder and a bunch of cones (4 actually). I started by creating a single cylinder (the middle one) with a high number of sides and then extruded the front and rear and scaled those extrusions to create additional cones (the ones immediately in front and back of the main cylinder) and then extruded once more for the final front and back cones and scaled them down to zero to close those two cones. Even if it's not so easy to see it in this picture I also shrunk the fuselage horizontally so the cylinder and the cones are elongated vertically to give it a little more of the traditional oval shape that airplane fuselages usually have. See in the next wireframe picture the high polygonal resolution around the fuselage and the obvious low polygonal resolution along the fuselage from front to back done with the extrusions. In this way I follow the low polygon in one direction only idea:

See what I did next: Page 152

I selected a few polygons on top of the middle cylinder and extruded them upward and scaled them down a little and created a rudimentary canopy with it then I selected those polygons that comprise this canopy and separated it from the model to be unfolded apart from the fuselage. I also created the holes that are going to be used for the wing and later on (not pictured here) I used those vertexes and segments (I duplicated them first) around the wing hole to form the wing. Also observe these additional loops that I created for the purpose of giving the hole of the wing the characteristic birds wing shape airfoil of wings:

In Blender I added these two new loops of vertexes with the Loop Cut tool (Ctrl +R) or by pressing the K key and selecting the first item (Loop Cut) but notice that I didn't change the shape of those cones in which I added these new loops that I used for the purpose of shaping the wing hole and that's why I used that tool precisely, because you can add a loop and position it anywhere on one of those cones without disturbing the shape that we need to preserve to maintain the low poly resolution along the fuselage. Notice the parts of the hole in front and back, notice how I added a few polygons there that serve the purpose of shaping the hole (so it's not just a rectangle) by using the new loops. I also added one of those loops to the middle of the canopy and raised the middle of the canopy top to give the canopy a bit more of a bubble shape, but a low poly in one direction one. Those are the kind of things you have to be careful with when creating your paper models. I don't know how that's done in many other 3D modeling software, different software may have different methods for adding loops but what you have to keep in mind is the fundamental principles of that, the methods to achieve the same will be varied but there are always ways. Page 153

Now, what I did to create the inner parts that make the paper model fuselage retain its shape was to select those rings of vertexes and segments one by one and duplicated those vertexes and segments with Shift+D, then I extruded them in the same place (meaning that I didn't pulled them one bit as you normally do with extrusions, this is what I call extruding without extruding because you use the extrusion function but you don't displace your selected vertexes, segments or faces one bit like you normally do with extrusions, you just click to finalize the command before you move the mouse one bit because that creates a duplicate of your selection but one that is still connected to the rest of the mesh) so I scaled the new vertexes and segments while they are still selected after the extrusion to zero toward the median point of the them to create the fill of the circle. After that you can select all the vertexes of these parts and use the remove doubles function and this is what I got:

As you can see there are holes in the middle of two of them that I cut for the wing which will go through the fuselage, the way I did this in this case was to select only parts of those two rings of vertexes in the middle and not the whole vertexes and segments circle and then did the process of extruding without moving and then scaling down to zero but for those half circles I positioned in Blender the 3D Cursor exactly between the two lower (or higher for the bottom half) vertexes by selecting said vertexes and then using (Shift+S) and then selecting Cursor Selection and then I changed the pivot to 3D cursor instead of median point:

After that I selected all the vertexes and extruded them without moving as before and then I scaled Page 154

those new vertexes while they were still selected to zero (but toward the 3D Cursor) and this is the result that I got:

After that I again selected all vertexes with Ctrl+A and applied the remove double vertex function (Rem Doubl) and that was all. That's how I made the center reinforcement parts by using the same vertexes that formed the outer fuselage and by using the same vertexes I maintained a correlation of the shape and size of the outer fuselage and the inner reinforcements and as you can see in this case those parts are really flat and you don't even need to flatten or unfold them because they already are (well except for the fact that if you do want to export them as a SVG shape you have to run them through the unfolding scripts anyway, too bad), what you do have to do is to reduce them a very tiny amount using a contour method of an illustration program (not scaling) as I described before and add gluing tabs or rings or whatever method you decide to use for gluing to the fuselage and like I said before I personally recommend the gluing tabs instead of those ring methods used by some designers. In the following picture you will see most of the parts of the airplane separated for unfolding with the Unfold script except perhaps the wing and vertical and horizontal stabilizers in the back which I had not separated in sections yet (if they need separation at all, some of them may not). As you may have noticed I separated many things for unfolding but it may not be necessary to separate everything that much for this purpose, remember the option of marking seams, I did it in this fashion here to show you better the options, to show better how far you can go if necessary, experience will show you what is the best degree of separation that works for you.

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I will show you next the small cartoonish jet completed with a display stand without any textures or artwork on the surface which in my case I would do in my illustration program CorelDraw and of course this is a very, very simple 3D model and if you want to do a real scale airplane it's more complex but take a good look and you will see that the same principles used to build this simple cartoon airplane paper model can be used for many airplanes and other models, with those scale models the proportions will be very different and they will have many more parts that will give the model detail but the basics are the same:

Our paper airplane in all white with some fancy 3D world background:

You can inspect this model closer cause I included the Blender 3D file (.blend file) with the book together with several other models and you can use these models as practice for unfolding if you want to. And here is the same model with a little bit of color such as silver paper for the fuselage (also not full textured artwork just a little color for illustration purposes) and of course for the paper model builder to use such a color he or she would have to buy special silver paper that can be printed on but that's just an option for the designer and/or the builder:

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Observe the engines and you will notice that they are built like the fuselage, high poly around, low poly along (front to back) and if I had created missiles, external tanks or bombs they would have been designed in a similar fashion. I did the horizontal stabilizer in a similar way as I did the wing but I didn't create a hole in the fuselage cause those two parts of the horizontal stabilizer were not going to go through it so I didn't delete those polygons on the side of the fuselage I just duplicated their vertexes and segments and used those same vertexes and segments for extrusion. For the vertical stabilizer I didn't create a hole either cause it's going to be glued to the fuselage in the same fashion and therefore I just modeled it on top of the fuselage. If you feel that the horizontal stabilizer is not sturdy enough in your model I suggest that you build it in a similar way as the wing for added strength and in that case you have to create it as a single piece and make another hole in the fuselage near the rear of it. One thing that is different in a real scale paper model is that the low polygon resolution is somewhat higher, that precisely, that the low poly direction can be higher, the higher that resolution is (the low one) the more precise the shape will be but remember that the higher that one is the more complex the model becomes also. Observe the following pictures of a commercial F-15 Eagle and a P-51D Mustang paper model of very high quality and complexity from ModelArt:

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This is a commercial F-15 model from ModelArt. The photo is courtesy of Felipe Navarro from Spain. You can buy the F-15 airplane model in the next web address: http://www.papermodels.co.il/

This is a commercial P-51 Mustang model also from ModelArt. The photo is courtesy of Gerardo Escobedo from http://paperjerry.blogspot.com/ (page is in Spanish). You can buy the P-51 at the same web address: http://www.papermodels.co.il/ Notice in these pictures the higher poly res in what we call in this document the low poly direction which is the same as in our cartoon example jet (front to back of fuselage) and because these models are of very high quality and they are scale models they have more divisions than in our example little jet, see for example that in the front of the F-15 jet there about 4 divisions before you get to the very front of the canopy in which there is another one making it 5 divisions (five loops of vertexes) in the front alone. Observe the front of the P-51 airplane and see that it also has quite a few divisions in the front part alone and observe the white tank below the wing and notice quite a few divisions there, Page 158

now, it is always a compromise because in paper modeling handling compound curves it's always a compromise but it is a good compromise because for it to be as round as it should be it would need a virtually impossible number of divisions or loops and that defeats the purpose of the low poly in one direction rule. The one thing you can clearly see in these pictures is that despite this compromise in the compound curves the airplane models retain a whole lot of the original shape and see how beautiful they look despite them being models made of paper only so the game is where to put those loops or divisions in the best place possible and how many to put without making it overly complicated and that will make the part retain most of the original shape, the essence of the original shape, the issue is where to put them and how many to put so the basic shape of the real object being modeled is preserved in the best way possible. Of course remember what I told you about the different skill level models that you may choose to design if for example you want to design models commercially (well you can do that too for free models but it's mostly done commercially), so if you design models in different skill levels those models of higher skill level could have more divisions than those of lower skill levels and more details in general than those of lower skill levels, etc. This principle also applies to low poly res in all directions in 3D video game models, you see, the modeler is trying to compromise the shape of the model as best as he or she can while still preserving the essential shape of the artistically drawn object or real life object being modeled, in paper model design that principle is the same but with the difference that it doesn't have to be that limited in polygonal resolution in at least one direction for the compound curves. Well, obviously these models vertex loops have much more complex shapes than the simple ovals that I created for my cartoonish model jet and that is where your 3D modeling skills will come to play, it may be possible to start with a high poly cylinder and then add many extrusions and then modify these loops little by little against pictures placed in the viewports in your 3D application. This is something that many 3D applications allow, try in the Internet a search for placing blueprints in your 3D application viewports or something similar and you will find many tutorials for this for just about any serious 3D program out there. It may be possible to modify the loops of your model in this way until they have the correct shape, or it may also be possible to model them in other ways cause most 3D programs provide many different tools to create many different kinds of 3D models, again your 3D modeling skills will be the determining factor and that's something that you will acquire with practice and that as I said before is beyond the scope of this book. The issue will be that after you understand the principles that need to be applied to paper model design you will have to learn to adapt your modeling methods and/or skills to these principles but this is really not that difficult to do and the more skilled you are as a 3D designer the easier it will be for you to adapt to paper modeling.

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Partial screenshot of a 3D Enterprise NCC-1701-D spaceship being modeled over a blueprint that has been placed in a viewport of a 3D application, a very common practice in 3D modeling today. Going back to the internal reinforcements issue, in the case of airplanes they may also have internal reinforcements for the wing that give it strength and shape but the principle is the same as what we did for the fuselage. You have to know that those internal shape parts do not have to be in the exact locations where the part changes shape, let me explain better, let's say that we take our middle cylinder in the fuselage of our simple jet that basically is the same height and width in front and back (just the original cylinder that we used as a starting point) and as you already know it has an internal reinforcement in the front and in the back only where the cylinder meets the cones that follow it again both in the front and in the back, see, just two reinforcements in those places but if the cylinder was too long I could put one or more internal reinforcements between the existing ones even if they are placed in an area that doesn't change shape or doesn't have a join and in some cases if you need to do that you may only have to design one reinforcement and copy it the number of times that you need it and you don't have to model the same part (the circle in this case) several times because copying it is all that's needed.

You may have to divide the cylinder or whatever part it is anyway even if that part retains its shape from the front to the back (like a long cylinder) in several sections if it is way too long and it requires more internal reinforcements because it may be easier to assemble and glue the model, that is up to you Page 160

the designer and again that's why you have to build prototypes, so you can see not only if these parts fit together well, but also to see if it's not way too difficult to assemble and glue them. Observe in the previous picture the selected circles in the middle, those are separated from the cylinders and just replicated from the cylinders lids so the cylinders walls are just one single piece but it can be separated in two sections like in the picture or even more if the cylinder is too long. There is also the possibility that the part doesn't change shape but changes size like in some of the internal reinforcements of an airplane wing precisely (in some wings) or other parts, you see, you could have a shape that tappers and reduces in size but retains the shape but the main point here is that those internal reinforcements do not always have to go in places where there are joins or there are shape changes (in the 172 Cessna's wing that I showed you before it is like that) it's just that most of the time they will because the model is usually easier to assemble and glue like that but this is just another option that you as a designer have for some special parts. Designing A Simple Airship So what about an airship? Let's take a look at a simple cartoonish airship example:

All that I used for the main basic shape was a Blender UVsphere primitive with lot's of vertical Rings and only about 16 horizontal divisions (Segments) as a starting point, that would vary depending on the airship being modeled of course, in old scale airships there are usually about 24 to 26 of those divisions and modern ones are rounder, in the second case (the modern blimp) the blimp could look better if the orientation of the compound curves was different and the direction of the compound curves was switched, perhaps just like in the airplane fuselage. So I created the UVsphere then I elongated it in the vertical axis and after that I rotated it 90 degrees to put it horizontally and then I used the Proportional Edit Falloff function afterward (the same one I used to twist the mushrooms 3D model) to shape the tips (the front and back) better by moving the vertexes at the tip in the front and the tip at the back and of course along the length of the fuselage affecting the vertexes closer to those two to a greater or lesser degree depending on their distance to them. After this I would have to add the fins and the engines and the other parts. You could shape it better of course by putting drawings or blueprints in the viewports in your 3D program but I didn't do it because I was doing it in a haste for the purpose of the book but I think that you can get the basic idea and for the internal reinforcements you simply do the same thing I did for the airplane but one difference is that I think that the best way to glue the inner reinforcements for the builder is to assemble the two half outer shells like this:

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After assembling both halves the builder should glue the inner reinforcements to one of the two halves and then glue the second halve to the other halve with the reinforcements already in place. Now observe the wireframe of that basic airship shape:

Notice the high number of rings along the fuselage length and you could easily select several of those vertex and segment rings and duplicate them and use them to build the inner parts. One thing that you can do after you duplicate the selected loops or rings and separated them is that you can move them to another layer where you can work in them comfortably without moving them out of position if you prefer so. Observe in the next picture how I selected 3 loops that can be used for the inner parts, in scale ships you would probably use twice that many. After selecting the loops I duplicated them with Shift+D and then while the new loops were still selected I separated them from that mesh by pressing P and choosing Selected in the small menu that appears. Observe those 3 selected loops:

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And this would be our completed airship after adding a few details like the fins, the crew area, the engines, etc:

I won't go too much into the details of how to do the rest because I believe it's pretty straightforward, as you can see, the 4 fins are all the same and very simple, the bottom part is basically a slightly modified cube and as you can see the engines are basically a few cones glued together that have a small elongated box at the sides to attach them to the passenger/crew area plus the propeller spinner which is simply a cone and the propeller blades which shape can be created with a Bezier Curve and can simply be two pieces of cardstock glued together to make them thicker and give them a bit of strength so they are not too soft. Then they can be cut with the propeller shape and as you can see it is pretty straightforward. If you want to know how I cut the fins and the passenger and crew area to fit the shape of the airship fuselage it was by using Boolean Tools* (they are basically functions in 3D programs that allow you to add, intersect or subtract a part to or from each other). And you can see in the next section a little bit of how to use Booleans because I used them to create the main deck of a small sea ship but remember that I'm barely touching these things because there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do Booleans for most 3D programs available (in Blender you select two meshes and then you press the W key to see the Boolean Tools menu), so basically I used the main fuselage shape as a 3D cookie cutter for one fin which I replicated and rotated 90 degrees 3 times for a total of 4 fins and for the passenger/crew part. You can also take a better look at this 3D model in Blender cause it is also included with the the other 3D model files. Page 163

Creating A Simple Sea Ship Paper model sea ships are usually of two kinds, those that have a complete hull and therefore normally come with a display stand so the ship can stand upright and those that have a flat bottom because they are cut at the waterline level meaning that everything below the waterline is omitted so you can see the ship as you normally see it when it is at sea. Now let's try to create a simple cartoonish sea ship of the first kind (of the ones that have a complete hull) and what I will use for this is Blender's NURBS Surfaces* (these are complex surfaces that are generated with curves and controlled or shaped through some special handles) which many modelers know come with many 3D packages. First I will make the hull:

By using a NURBS Surface I have created the ship's hull which has compound curves that will have to be simplified of course but first notice in the side picture how I shaped the NURBS Control Points to make most of the upper line of the hull straight:

The top is really mostly straight only but it will be converted to a mesh object later on and then one can make small corrections by hand to straighten it better if it's needed. The important thing about using NURBS for this purpose is that to a certain degree you can control the number of divisions across both directions for the shape, across the hull's length and across the hull's width and that's where it becomes handy for paper modeling. Observe in the next picture that the number of divisions from front Page 164

to back of the boat's hull is very high but the number of divisions across the hull's width is really relatively low:

In the case of Blender you can control that with the two following parameters that you set in the Curve Tools panel that appears when you add a NURBS Curve or NURBS Surface in the 3D world and then enter the Edit Mode (Tab) for that selected curve or surface while the editing panels are selected (F9):

Well, you have to know that there are limitations with Blender's NURBS and that this number cannot be controlled or specified as easily or as exactly as you can do with the Spin method (the method used to create the goblet and the mushrooms). In addition the placement of the divisions across the width of the hull is not as even as it is with the spin method meaning that the spacing between one division and the other is not equal, still despite this there is a lot that can be done with NURBS surfaces for paper models and I did a boat's hull with this method here but this may as well have been a car's fender or many other things and the high point of NURBS is that it can be used to create many kinds of Page 165

shapes and they don't have to be circular or symmetrical like in the Spin method. Remember that Blender and many other 3D programs allow you to delete or add loops of segments (a row of them) and in the case of Blender you can delete loops by selecting a loop by pressing Alt at the same time you are right mouse clicking in a segment while being in the Edge select mode (Ctrl+Tab+2) then by pressing the X key after that and in the small menu that appears selecting the last item (Edge Loop) the selected edge loop disappears but the good thing about this is that you can delete a loop like this without having to manually stitch the 3D mesh together again and you can add a loop or several loops by using the Loop Cut tool (Ctrl+R) and after adding a loop you will have to do some manual adjustments because the Loop Cut tool won't place the new division (the new edge loop) in a position that will make the shape rounder or smoother, that is something that you will have to control manually and that may not be exactly easy so this is somewhat limited but it can be used to add a bit of control to the NURBS surface divisions position and numbers which is many times necessary. Now, one important thing about all that is that you can only add or delete loops like that after the NURBS shape has been converted to a mesh, you have to convert it to a mesh first after you are satisfied with the shape and then you can add or delete vertex loops and other things in it with the tools that I've just mentioned. Again remember that like in other methods described in this book you can choose which of the two directions is the low poly one by playing with the two Curve Tools parameters that I showed you in the previous picture. You can see the low poly direction change here:

And now observe how the hull would look with that change when converted to a mesh. I already added the rear panel (after conversion to a mesh) by extruding and scaling the last loop of vertexes (the very last one at the rear) in the same way I did in the airplane inner reinforcements:

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But now let's go back to the other hull with the low polygonal resolution in the original direction and orientation in which we started and after achieving the correct NURBS shape that I wanted I duplicated the NURBS object and converted one of the copies to a mesh and after that I adjusted the upper ring of vertexes until I made them perfectly horizontal (if that is what I wanted of course, I may have wanted it to be curved) by selecting the upper ring or loop that makes the upper edge of the hull and scaling it (S key) to 0 (holding the Ctrl key) but while restraining the scale to one axis only (in this case the vertical axis or Z axis by pressing the Z key after pressing the S key) it can also be done in one axis only through the transform manipulator (transform widget) in scale mode (Ctrl+Alt+S) again while holding the Ctrl key by only moving the blue handle which is the Z axis until the scale value reaches 0 (you can see the value at the lower left of the 3D View window). After I did that I had to do a bit of manual adjustments of some vertexes in the front and that was it. The next thing that I wanted to create was the upper deck which goes below the upper line of the hull (the one I've just straightened). It is a little below the upper ring of vertexes of the ship's hull and for that I used a Boolean function. I created a new object, a Mesh Cube, I reshaped it to be longer and wider than the hull and I placed it above the ship:

Take a look at it from the side and notice how I placed it below the upper part of the hull because the bottom of the cube is going to be our main deck level:

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The result of the Boolean operation was this:

But all that I needed from the resulting objects was the ring of segments that forms the main deck which is this (the yellow line):

So I selected it and duplicated it and separated it from the resulting Boolean shape: Page 168

Now I created a surface with that ring of vertexes by extruding them without moving like I done before with the airplane inner parts and then scaling those extruded but not moved vertexes down to zero (again you do that in Blender by holding the Ctrl key while you scale the vertexes down with the mouse toward the Median Point until the scale value indicates zero) and this is what I got:

After that I removed the duplicate vertexes by using the remove doubles (Rem Doubl) function that I mentioned before and that is our upper deck which doesn't need flattening if you save it to DXF and if you use the B-Paperizer script you don't have to convert it to triangles to save it to SVG cause this particular shape is already made of triangles. After that you do the rest of the finishing in your illustration application. So what if I want to add inner reinforcements to give the hull shape and/or to give it strength? A similar thing to the method of the airplane, I selected a few vertex rings from the hull mesh, duplicated them and separated them from the hull and did the same trick as in some of the the airplane inner parts (the ones that were not a full ring), I placed the 3D Cursor between the two upper vertexes of every vertex and segment ring and I extruded without moving each vertex ring and then scaled to zero by using the 3D Cursor one by one, same thing and that's how I created the inner reinforcement parts. One thing to remember is that I had to edit the vertex rings a little, I had to move the two upper vertexes to a new position to match the level of the upper deck because the two upper vertexes were at the level of the upper part of the hull and these parts had to be beneath the main deck of the ship which I created with the Boolean method: Page 169

See in the next picture when I am adjusting the upper vertexes to match the level of the deck against the full model. I didn't do it in perspective of course, I changed the view to see the ship from the front and turned the perspective off and I zoomed in and then adjusted those two vertexes in pairs for every reinforcement shape. And you can also see in this picture that I added a simple boxy upper part above the main deck and a simple funnel which is a modified cylinder with high poly resolution:

This is the ship finished:

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I also selected again a couple of the hull's vertex rings, duplicated them, separated them from the hull and by playing with them a little I formed some Y shaped supports for a display stand and then I extruded them to give them depth of course, then I added a simple beveled base and with that I modeled the whole thing, notice that it's pretty much low poly all over. The vertexes that I duplicated and separated from the hull that form an inverted arc are the higher ones, they form the upper surface that make contact with the ship's hull because they maintain the correlation with the ship size and shape:

And this is our cartoonish ship with the stand (this 3D model is also included with the book):

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Waterline Sea Ships Our next example is the second type of sea ship model and is the one that has only everything that's above the waterline so it has a flat bottom and of course it doesn't need a display stand because it's designed precisely to be put on top of a flat surface such as a desk. Take a look at such a hull shape:

You can find a free Japanese Coast Guard Paper Model very similar to that one in the previous picture (but with texture artwork) which we will recreate and it is located at this address: http://www.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/01kanku/paper/paper.htm So let's suppose that we wanted to recreate such a hull for a paper model and I will do something similar by drawing a curve more or less like this:

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You see, it's cartoonish again (well kind of for illustration purposes, it has proportions a bit shorter front to back but it is not as cartoonish as the other models, it is a bit more elaborate but still simplified and not made to true scale) kinda similar in shape to a Japanese Coast Guard ship of Souya class. I duplicated the curve and converted one to a mesh but not before making sure that the number of segments of the curve was high so I obtained a high polygonal resolution. I actually gave it more than you will probably need (a value of 64) but that's up to you. I entered Edit Mode and duplicated the vertexes and flipped them over to form the other half and then I removed the duplicate vertexes (you do that to join the mesh in Blender, in other 3D programs it could be different but it's a similar process) and it looks like this:

Now I extruded that shape upward to create the hull walls:

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After the extrusion I placed the 3D Cursor right in the middle of the ship (from side to side) and close to the middle (front to back) and then I selected the upper front vertexes as shown and I stretched them forward (notice how those upper selected vertexes shifted forward progressively) and as you can see we already have a shape very similar to the Japanese Coast Guard ship and if I added the bottom it would look something like this:

I also expanded the upper ring or loop of vertexes (all of them) and stretched it a little from side to side so the hull tappers downward and see the hull from the front now:

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If I wanted to add the main deck I could just use a technique similar to the one I used in our previous ship except that in this ship the main deck is not completely below the upper edge of the hull. Notice that it's only like that at the front (because it is supposed to have guard rails at the rear). One thing you could do is that after you extrude the shape upward you could extrude it a little bit more instead (past the previous point of the top of the hull) and then you add an additional loop with the Loop Cut tool (again this process could be different in other programs) that is placed at the previous level so you see that after this the hull will be extended above the previous level but with a Loop Cut at the main deck level and that was all that was needed to form our main deck, but why I could use this with this hull instead of Booleans that are more complicated like in our previous ship (the one with the display stand)? Because the shape of this hull in this model is much simpler and because of that it allows the use of adding a loop of vertexes at the position shown, if you try the same with our previous ship it doesn't create a horizontally straight main deck using either low poly direction so that model demanded the use of Booleans for that, it demanded it cause with the hull's more complex compound curves the Booleans are better suited for that. Try it and you will see what I mean. Just look at the shape of the other hulls of the ship (in either low poly direction or at those compound curves angles) and you may see what I mean but in this case it's just much easier to create the main deck level by using the Loop Cut function of Blender, observe that that loop that we just created will be precisely our main deck level:

And now we remove the unnecessary vertexes and leave the front edge of the hull higher: Page 175

See how it would look:

I can use that newer loop of vertexes and create the main deck in the same way I created the bottom of the ship and that's it. I won't go any further with the ship details cause there is no need for that at this point of this book and they are far easier because they are boxy low polygon and very easy to do overall. You can probably figure out the rest of that ship just with what you have learned up to this point and even more. The important thing here is really that you realize that the same principle of low poly in one direction is just as present here in the making of the hull, in the case of this hull in particular it's very high poly all around the hull, we created that when we gave a high number of segments to our original curve before converting it into a mesh and our low poly direction where is it? It's just one division, only one section formed by both the bottom and top vertex loops of our hull, do you see? Of course it could have more if the model requires it. Also in this ship I don't think that it would be necessary to put internal reinforcements (depending on the model not being too large of course) cause between the bottom shape and the main deck it would probably be enough to maintain the shape of the hull due mostly to its simple shape. Notice that the orientation of the compound curves is of course vertical in this case. That is the important thing to get here for the purpose of paper modeling, creating our models in such a way as to be low poly in one direction only (for compound surfaces) and maintaining that all the time in our minds and in our models, that's why I been repeating this all over this book over and over again so you get it well and you see at least a few simple examples of how this principle is applied to Page 176

paper modeling and to see how to apply it to different types of models and shapes to give you a headstart, of course paper models can be far more complex than these models, many airplane fuselages and many ship's hulls will be more complex but once you get the hang of the basics the rest is just much easier and again if you want to learn how to make more complex ship hulls the best way to learn faster is to assemble a few of the models out there while observing carefully how their designers solved their shape problems and after that, practice and trial and error will be your friends, you will learn if you are patient and as you acquire experience you will be able to create more and more complex models. In the section after the next one I will show you how to unfold this shape and how I do other things to it so read on. Instancing And The Mirror Modifier An interesting thing here that I want to introduce you to is that in reality in many of these models that I've been doing I didn't really need to do the whole model as I have been showing you, I been doing that only to show you these paper modeling principles. If you go back a little you will see that when I started our last ship I created a curve which I converted to a mesh and then I duplicated that and mirrored it to create the bottom shape of the ship but this was really not necessary for the big majority of models that are symmetrical, meaning models that are the same at both sides of an imaginary plane that intersects them right at the middle cause you can use the Mirror modifier (in Blender while you see the Editing panel (F9) you select your mesh and go to the Modifiers tab and press the Add Modifier button and in the menu that appears select Mirror) or it can also be done with Instancing* (to create an instance instead of a copy and what that does is that when you make any changes to the original model those changes are reflected in the instanced duplicates) and in this case you would need a mirrored instanced duplicate (mirrored at the middle of the imaginary plane). For Instancing you need to get into Object Mode which you toggle with Tab and select an object and then you press Alt-D to create an instanced copy and then you need to mirror it to create a reversed half. Nowadays instead of Instancing Blender 3D modelers use the Mirror modifier, they used to do this with Instancing before but it is easier now with the Mirror modifier. In many other 3D programs modelers use Instancing or they use similar techniques and they use it all the time which allows you for example to start to work in half a tridimensional model and then see the changes that you make on the original model half reflected on that second instanced half model that is mirrored across the imaginary plane that usually is any of the 3 axes of the 3D world of a 3D software program. Then you join the two halves at the end to form a whole model. Instancing is not only used for modeling in this fashion in 3D modeling, instancing is also used to create copies of a model that have to be repeated many times in a 3D scene but instanced copies have the distinct advantage that whenever the modeler makes any changes in the original those changes are reflected in all the copies so if for example you create a certain column and you make many copies of that column and afterward you decide to change something in that original column you don't have to replicate and reposition all the columns that you have, by doing the changes to the original column they are replicated in the other columns. Let's go back to modeling and take a look at an example of using the Mirror modifier in Blender while modeling the body of a simple figure (for the head I just used a UV Sphere with low divisions cause the Subsurface Divider (Subsurf modifier) will smooth it anyway, but I really just used only half of the sphere and then I manipulated it a bit to join it with the rest of the body), notice how it's aligned so the middle of the model is exactly at the middle of the 3D world (notice in this case the blue line that goes right through our model from the top through the bottom of the image which is the vertical axis of the 3D world), after I started to model it (very early) I applied the Mirror modifier and Page 177

then I applied the Subsurf modifier (the Mirror modifier should be applied first to prevent having to remove and reapply the Subsurf modifier later on). This is a front view without perspective:

See it from an angle:

Notice here that I'm moving a polygon of the left arm in this figure and as I select and move that polygon what happens is that the right arm changes exactly the same as the left arm. This figure is not intended for paper modeling cause it's too round with all the subsurface divisions I gave it, this is just to illustrate to new paper model designers the use of modeling with the Mirror modifier or instance modeling as it's done with other 3D programs (or with something similar to the Mirror modifier in other software if they offer it) but the subsurface division smoothing could be removed and the low poly box model could be modified to use it as a low poly 3D model for paper model unfolding. See what happened after I clicked the Apply button of the Mirror modifier. When you click the Apply button in the Mirror modifier it leaves the other model half in place to give you a whole model with both sides and it removes the double vertexes at the middle of the body automatically in a similar way to what happens when you use the Rem Doubl (remove doubles) vertex function, I also removed the polygons in the middle as I modeled the figure, those that are face to face with each other so the subsurface division looks smoother in the middle even before you apply the Mirror modifier and this is how it looks after applying it and without the low poly boxy cage:

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So you see that many times you can work in only half the model and in paper modeling many times that can be the case not only for modeling itself but also after exporting the flattened pattern to an illustration program or bitmap editor because parts or faces will be repeated many times the more symmetrical or regular model parts are. If we were talking about our Coast Guard boat hull we didn't necessarily even have to use the Mirror modifier or instance the model half but you could use the Mirror modifier or instancing for the purpose of modeling because it's easier to visualize how the model looks as a whole and I will show you next an example of using only half of it as we unfold our previous boat hull. Unfolding The Hull Of A Boat Model Like we said we could work with the model as a whole but let's say that we worked with half the model only. Either we could work with half a model or build the whole model and then just use half of it for unfolding, as you can see this is something that you can decide to do in different stages of the model creation process. So for illustration purposes I cut our hull in half, see it from above:

Now I separated the bottom of the hull from the walls to unfold it:

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After that, I selected the front part (only the part that has the row of polygons on top that protrudes above the rest of the main deck level) and separated it from the rest of the mesh:

Next, I removed the loop that it has in the middle, why? to make the unfolding process easier, in this case we can afford that because that upper section of polygons doesn't really change shape it just continues upward and this is very important cause remember that I added a loop of segments and deleted some polygons at the top of the hull and the importance here is that by adding a loop using the Loop Cut tool in Blender the shape doesn't change at all but if I modify those polygons above that loop of polygons afterward let's say by scaling them horizontally or similar then the unfolder may or may not work cause if the top line of modified polygons overlap the others one way or another when unfolding then you have to separate that upper row of polygons that protrudes, unfold it separately and then place it at the correct position in your image editor and join it or design it to be glued to the lower part afterward by the builder. One thing to be careful with is that before you separate the front part and before you remove that loop of segments as you will see in the next picture you should make a duplicate of the whole loop front to back of the hull so you can use it to create the main deck afterward so make a duplicate of it first and then place it somewhere, perhaps in another layer where you can fill the loop as was previously done with the airplane inner reinforcements so you get the pattern of half of the main deck. Now see the hull wall after the loop is removed: Page 180

In the case of this hull wall I had to use the B-Paperizer script instead of Unfold because for one reason or another (quads not flat more often than not) the Unfold script was refusing to do this and it happens usually in cases of very high polygonal resolution such as this which are key for professional models and in that case the B-Paperizer handles them nicely and with far less problems, it may be possible that you get the Unfold script to work by dividing and separating some sections of the hull wall but why go to such trouble? That's what I meant before when I said that in many instances the BPaperizer script was superior in performance to the other and that's why I think it's vital to have both in your arsenal when you create paper models with Blender, if you get into too much trouble with Unfold give B-Paperizer a spin. Too bad that B-Paperizer doesn't come yet with Blender, I think it should because it's very good, probably better than the other even though the other may be good for simpler things that you are sure have flat quads. I have to tell you that here and there even B-Paperizer can get into a wee bit of trouble when trying to flatten something and in that case remember the basics rules of separating into sections. Here it had a little trouble because when I removed the line of segments there was a small separation of the vertexes of the front part so I divided that front section (that's why a section is highlighted in yellow in the last picture). Take a look at the problem that can be clearly seen if I move one vertex a little to the front:

Well in reality the script couldn't unfold everything because the shape was really broken here so it is not really the script's fault, the script unfolded almost everything but it stopped right at this point, but this is something that can be handled in two ways: one is to separate the front part from the back and Page 181

unfold them separately and the other is to fix the broken mesh. Let's try it both ways, here I continue working with the front part but before I convert it to triangles I have to do the basics as I mentioned early in this document, select all the vertexes and remove doubles, turn all normals outside and make sure that the scale is all 1 in all three axes or the script will not work right and then I convert all the polygons to triangles as you can see in the next image:

Then I flattened both patterns, the front and the rest of the hull and this is what I got:

I used the SVG export function of the script and then I imported the pattern into CorelDraw X3, you can see here that I already joined the two parts of the hull wall together. In CorelDraw I didn't really have to join them, all I had to do was to place the front part in the right position with the Smart Guides and then I could just select both parts of the hull wall or group them together to use the Create Boundary function:

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The other way to make the script work was to fix the broken geometry and I sort of deleted a few faces and filled the holes (in Blender that is done with the [F] key, you select for example three vertexes and hit the [F] key and Blender creates a polygon and I've seen similar functions in many other 3D programs) so that rearranged a few triangles and allowed the geometry to really be continuous:

And the script worked just fine as it is expected and here is the resulting whole pattern:

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So, outside in CorelDraw X3 I used the Create Boundary function to create an outline of this in just one click and you can either save or delete the previously imported pattern as you wish cause you don't need it anymore. And here is an important thing which is to realize that when we use the BPaperizer script in this high poly resolution in one direction way the issue of the triangles becomes as irrelevant as with quads because when we use such a high resolution of polygons and then smooth the pattern of a section or a part of a model we don't have to deal with the triangle folds whatsoever because both quads and triangles get lost completely in the smoothing process, those folds just become smoothly curved surfaces at the moment of assembling the model. Take a look at the flattened pattern:

Remember that you have two different smoothing methods as we discussed earlier, you could leave the pattern just like that or you could trace over it a smoother line which is my favorite. Here you can see again the red color I gave to the smoothed pattern lines for illustration purposes:

Observe that I already duplicated, mirrored and welded together two halves of the bottom to form the whole bottom after drawing the smoother red line over the previous pattern and here again is the issue of working only in parts of the model and replicating them in our graphic editor. Now you can add the gluing tabs in your illustration program and I will show you some techniques to handle some of the most difficult ones in the next section.

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Handling The Gluing Tabs At Curves The placement of the gluing tabs is sometimes your decision because in the pattern in the previous picture you can place the gluing tabs at either the bottom of the hull or at the hull walls, just decide which one you feel is best for the part that you are doing and if there is any problem with that when you build the prototype then make the necessary changes. I decided in this case to place them at the hull walls and that's what I will show you. In the following picture you can see that I created the first gluing tab which is the longest:

And here I placed it into position and I also placed the other straight gluing tabs and of course the straight ones are the easiest:

But how about those curves? What's the best way to handle those gluing tabs? I have a pretty good method, let me show you. What I do first is to create a shape like either one of these two in the next picture and as you can see they are very similar and the second one is just a derivative of the first that has the top and bottom chopped off:

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So why did I created a shape like this? Take a look at the following picture and then I will explain why:

I made the parts to which the gluing tabs would be attached somewhat transparent so you could see the gluing tabs that are stacked beneath them. See the trapezoidal shape that I created for the top two examples? As you can see in convex curves it isn't a problem but in concave curves it leaves a hole and observe that with the hexagonal shape it fills that hole very nicely no matter where you place the gluing tab in the curve. Now, in real use you would have to create smaller gluing tabs for such a curve cause the radius in this example is too small but it is good here to show you more clearly that hole that the trapezoidal shape leaves. Next I created a row of those hexagonal shapes and placed them at the beginning of one of our curves and they are snapped together at the horizontal vertexes as you can see in the picture:

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Notice how the first one of the hexagonal shapes to the left has the leftmost vertex centered to the rightmost vertex of the very long straight gluing tab, I snapped the whole group to it using Dynamic Guides cause it's very easy to do with it (In Illustrator and DrawPlus X4 this process is very similar). Why I placed them like this over the curve? To try to estimate how many I need to cover the curve when I place them correctly. Another thing that I can do is to stretch or shrink them them horizontally (in this example) to try to match the length of the curve as best as possible as indicated by the blue arrows:

After the horizontal size adjustment make a copy of that group of tabs and place them in another layer as backup for the next technique after this one that you may want to try later on. In the next illustration I already placed three of them correctly and notice how they start to follow the curve as I snapped them to it (the first three to the left) and also see that I started to place the fourth one by snapping its leftmost vertex where the rightmost vertex of the last shape I placed is, so the fourth hexagonal shape is already snapped to the last one but notice that it is still horizontal cause I haven't rotated it yet into position as indicated by the area within the blue circle which shows that the rightmost vertex of my shape is not snapped to the curve yet:

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The next thing I did was to change to Rotation Mode and snap the Center of Rotation (the pivot point) of the hexagonal shape to its leftmost vertex:

Then still in Rotation Mode (and here is one of those situations in which Dynamic and Smart Guides really shine) I grabbed the hexagonal shape by the rightmost vertex and snapped it while rotating to the curve:

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And that's how I placed those gluing tabs at those curves but unfortunately in many other illustration programs such as Inkscape you can't do this last step like that because you can snap vertexes and you can snap the Center of Rotation but you cannot snap while rotating by grabbing a vertex (a node/control point) or a segment (in this example the rightmost vertex of the hexagonal figure) to the curve. I tried it in Xara Designer and in Inkscape and I couldn't find a way to snap in this fashion and there are plenty of those tabs that you have to place and parts to arrange so these smart tools are tremendous time savers. In programs like Inkscape remember that after snapping the pivot point to the leftmost vertex you have to zoom in a little and rotate the shape and align the rightmost vertex to the curve by eye as I explained before. If you have a CAD program that have a similar smart snapping feature then you are in luck. I have not tested any of the 2D CAD programs that I mentioned in this document enough to tell you if they have such capability (I wish I had the time to do it cause I would) but some of them might so you can try them to see if they do. When you get to the end you may have this problem of course cause you just estimated the length of the gluing tabs horizontally:

The circle shows a gap between the last hexagonal gluing tab of the curve and the next straight gluing tab. What I do in this example is that I undo the rotation of that last hexagonal shape that I just placed to get it in the horizontal position again and then I stretch it horizontally while trying to estimate the amount that is needed to cover the gap. If instead of a gap what I got is the hexagonal shape going over the next tab then I would shrink it instead:

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After that I rotated and snapped it again to see if it filled the gap, if it didn't or if it went over the straight tab I simply would undo the rotation again and either shrink or stretch my shape trying to get the right measure and then I would rotate it into place again. I keep repeating this process until I get the right amount. Don't worry, it doesn't take long before you get the right amount. See the tabs in place and in the correct stacking position which is beneath the hull wall part:

The last tab that I placed is just a bit wider than the others but that ain't much of a problem. This is how it looks when finished with a little bit of color:

Vector illustration. After finishing the hull wall I replicated it and flipped it vertically to create the other side and I Page 190

removed the repeated gluing tabs (at the front and back of the hull wall) and voila! our hull is done, all that would remain to be done would be the artwork. If you see small imperfections in some of these vector illustrations when you zoom in a little that's because of the conversion process from CorelDraw X3 to Open Office Draw and then to PDF (if you are reading a PDF version) but in CorelDraw X3 to PDF or Illustrator to PDF or the like the quality is usually higher. Even from Open Office Draw to PDF it is usually a bit higher but it just happens that Open Office Draw is not yet as precise when drawing as CorelDraw and other illustration programs are, perhaps it will evolve one day to be a little more precise or at least more precise in conversions from one vector format to the other, Open Office Draw is not a bad program, it can have its uses but if I was going to use an open source illustration program for paper model design I would choose Inkscape instead because it is more precise and more robust and growing better much faster than Open Office Draw. By the way, I printed this pattern in cardstock and assembled a prototype of the hull and it fitted together very nicely. I also tested re-importing several of the pages that contain vector illustrations in the PDF version of this book back into CorelDraw X3, Inkscape, Illustrator and Open Office Draw and the illustrations imported just fine, not bad considering all the conversions. In Illustrator I had to Ungroup (Object menu Ungroup or use Shift+Ctrl+G) the parts and then use the Release of the Clipping Mask function (Object menu, Clipping Mask then select Release or use Alt+Ctrl+7) to be able to manipulate the parts separately again. In most programs you just have to Ungroup to do that. If you want more perfection with the gluing tabs you can do a trick that can help you get the measure of the gluing tabs right. You can use the grouped copy of the original bunch of gluing tabs that I told you to save a while ago, those that were straight before you started to place them along the curve. You just keep them somewhere (like in another layer as I did) then later on you can adjust them together as I will explain:

Notice that in the next few illustrations I turned off the layer of the backup of grouped gluing tabs momentarily. The next thing that you will do is to delete the last tab that you placed in the curve (the wide one) as can be seen in the next picture:

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After that you will copy one of the other similar hexagonal tabs and place it at the end again leaving our previous gap:

So why do you want the gap again for? To measure it. You can draw a straight line in the middle of the two vertexes that are at the end of the gap (one at the end of the hexagonal tab and the other at the end of the straight tab) and you place it by snapping its ends to those two aforementioned vertexes so it covers the exact length the gap, you can use the node or control point edit tool (in CorelDraw it's called the Shape Tool) to do that, notice the yellow line:

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You may not see too well that it is really snapped to the ends of the other tabs but that's because of the thickness of the lines but it is. Now you have to place a straight horizontal line nearby and you will use it to make our measuring line perfectly straight horizontally in the same fashion that you do to align the gluing tabs. First you align one of its vertexes to the horizontal line by aligning that vertex as an object and not with the nodes or control point edit tool (the mentioned Shape Tool but don't use that) because if you do it with a nodes/control points edit tool it will loose its measure:

Then you move its Rotation Center (pivot point) to that same vertex that you first snapped to the horizontal line and then rotate the measuring line and snap the other vertex to the line again as an object and not with a nodes editing tool so you rotate it as an object and snap the second vertex to the horizontal line:

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Do you see? Now your measuring line is perfectly horizontal. After your measuring line is completely horizontal you can delete the other horizontal line (in this case the black one). Now delete the first set of hexagonal gluing tabs that you placed already over the curve. The next thing that you will do is to bring back the old group of hexagonal gluing tabs that you saved in another layer as backup and place the measuring line at one of the ends of the group, you will snap one of the measuring line vertexes to the last horizontal vertex of the group at either left or right of the group but the measuring line has to be at the outside of the selected snapping vertex, in this case at right:

After that you will adjust the whole group (while still grouped or while still selected as a whole group) by scaling with the Selection Handles (CorelDraw, in Illustrator by the Bounding Box Handles, in Serif DrawPlus by the Object Handles, etc.), you will snap the rightmost vertex of the whole group to the other vertex of the measure line:

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The result of this is that all those gluing tabs now will approximate the measure of the curve much better so you will Ungroup them and then place them at the curve again:

What you will get with that after placing them all is that they will cover the gap but they will all be the same size. Observe the final result:

It will not necessary match perfectly (in this case it did) cause this is a bit of a loose process Page 195

because we used a straight line to measure the remaining gap of a curve but it will be far closer and if it's not close enough you can either repeat this last process or simply adjust the measure of the last tab as we did earlier when we did the curve tabs the first time, when we made the last tab wider to compensate. The difference that we will obtain now is that the gap will be much smaller and because of that it is likely that people will not notice at all that the last tab is just very slightly wider. Nice and neat. Overlapping Tabs And Fixing Bad Looking Corners Sometimes when you assemble a prototype you will notice that some gluing tabs overlap at some corners. When you design the model as a flat piece the tabs may look OK but when you fold and glue a part together you may notice that in some areas one gluing tab will overlap another inside a part, this is not necessary a problem cause this is usually not visible after the model is fully assembled, in many instances it will be just fine but as a general rule and as a courtesy to the model builder it is best if the tabs do not overlap at the moment of building cause they are a bit easier to glue when they do not so if you find such an instance and you want to fix it all you have to do is to increase the angle of the gluing tabs sides. Notice that gluing tabs usually taper and become smaller toward the outside so they are larger at the side that connects with the part and smaller at the outer side (in most cases because in some models like product packages or boxes for example you know that they can also be straight with curved corners) so if you get an overlapping problem somewhere that you want to fix what you do is simply to make it taper even more to make the outside even smaller yet of either one of the conflicting tabs or in both of them and then you can test another prototype until the problem disappears, again this is just an option in the big majority of cases. In some instances the overlap could become a problem but it is rare so it's up to you. You may get odd corners when you put parts together like this in illustration programs:

That is a common thing in illustration software, all you have to do is to make the corners of the lines round, most illustrations programs can do this if not all, and then it looks better like this and problem fixed:

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And in the next rendering is the completed ship, again with some coloring but no texture artwork and some fancy water texture background only. Remember that I already told you a while ago to save the loop of segments of the main deck level in another layer before removing it at the front so you could use it to create the deck and after I created the main deck I manipulated it a bit at the rear to create the straight lines platform that overhangs a little over the hull. Again see that it is really not necessary to go over the details of how I made the other parts because as you can see they are very simple very low poly boxy objects in this particular example and they are very easy to model and to unfold. There is nothing there above the main deck that you haven't learned how to unfold in this book already, take a good look and you will notice that and if you have any doubts about how it is really put together the 3D Blender model is included in the models package for your inspection and/or for practice:

Let's see now another simple cartoonish waterline cargo ship that I modeled but notice that it has a Page 197

more complex hull shape (more round compound curves) so I gave it several divisions front to back:

It just has the low poly resolution direction of the hull front to back. I modeled the hull again with NURBS and converted it to a mesh then I did two Booleans, one for the main deck and another for the bottom to trim the lower part from the mesh. After Boolean operations you usually have to do cleaning of the mesh to fix little quirks that Blender does with this function. Well, Blender Booleans work all right but let's just say that they aren't the best Booleans I've ever used so you usually have to do a little bit of manual cleaning of the Boolean mesh after the Boolean operation is completed, it's just the way it is sometimes and sometimes it is just like that with any other 3D program Booleans anyway but see that I got decent results with it. And again the upper geometry is just very simple low poly boxy stuff that's very easy to do for this very simple model (save the front post and the funnel at the rear which come from high poly cylinders) and let's see how it will look with a bit of color and a sea texture even if it doesn't have full artwork:

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If you are creating sort of a diorama then you can create a base (flat or tridimensional) and give it a textured ocean artwork and you could create some flat pieces with curved shapes with those textured water splashes for the front sides of the hull and place them at the base and for the wake behind the ship you could paint it on your ocean artwork, this ocean texture that you see in this picture is entirely procedural* (created without textures and just with material settings inside a 3D program) except for the water splashes in front and the wake behind the ship which I did hastily in The Gimp and see that it's pretty nice for quick and simple artwork (Blender 3D model in the previous picture is also available in the models package). A Submarine Take a look at this picture from a paper model submarine available freely from the Internet, this is a Los Angeles Class submarine created by a paper modeler that goes by the name of U-Don:

The previous photo is courtesy of Barx2 (Joe Polchlopek) from North Carolina. You can download the free model here: http://udonfact.hp.infoseek.co.jp/paper/down/down.html Notice that in essence it is basically our jet airplane again except that instead of a canopy it has a tower and instead of wings it has fins and that it has a display stand that looks more like our sea ship stand. Notice again that just like in the ModelArt airplanes it has far more divisions or vertex loops front to back (its low poly direction) because it's a scale model and one of high quality and detail. I won't talk too much about how to go about creating something like this because I think that with what I explained already in this book is enough information for you to deduct more or less how a paper model like this can be created and besides if you have any doubts you can just take a look at U-Don's model patterns. If you were to model a torpedo, missile, bomb or rocket you may have already deducted that again it's a similar procedure to the creation of the jet airplane in most cases cause they are usually very cylindrical and symmetrical shapes. Here in the next picture you can see that in this version of the book I did a Cartoonish submarine very similar to the previous one but with less detail and less divisions. I was able to model this in just a few hours and again it doesn't really have texture artwork, its polygons just have been colored with multiple materials for demonstration only: Page 199

The IncludedModels.zip file now also has this Blender 3D model file that you may use to inspect it and get a better idea of how U-Don's submarine was put together and you may also use it for separation and unfolding practice. The black model in the background has a few differences apart from the other color scheme, it has the parts already cut with Booleans so that is the one to use for unfolding. The rear fins, the tower structure and the fins attached to the tower structure have already been cut with Booleans while in the foreground multicolored submarine they are still whole which is something that you can see in Wireframe mode. The fins that I did in the back are similar, the three top ones are the same and the one in the bottom is the same but it has been slightly shortened. Of course in the scale model the two rear fins that are at the sides of the hull are really different but here I did them equal for simplicity and for a cartoonish model it could be OK to leave a few details out cause in such a model this can be done depending on the choice of the designer but overall you will see that it is very, very similar to the full scale model in many things. The screw in the foreground multicolored one has thickness for the purpose of rendering but the background model doesn't have any, it is flat because for the purpose of unfolding that is better and a little thickness can be added by indicating to the builder that he/she has to glue two layers of material to get the screw right and it can be designed as such in the patterns as it is done in U-Don's scale submarine. As you can see I also created a display stand for the little sub that is very similar in appearance to the full scale model one. Again in the patterns of that stand you would create copies of the sides of the stand (one or two for a total of three perhaps) to give the side parts more strength. The letters and the white background were done as flat 3D vectors for speed with a little offset from the surface to prevent rendering problems but in real life you would probably want to create that as a texture in the patterns. There is also one layer that contains three internal reinforcement (or shaping) circles that are aligned with the black sub's hull so you can see where they are supposed to go. In this same file you can take a look at the last layer in which there are two curves (two different half curves) that I used to create the tower structure and the fins and in that same layer there is also a 3D mesh fin that you can use as a starting point to manipulate it and create scale fins. You could manipulate the curves that I did as you see fit too. Also you will see the other hull that I did that is more to scale with a real Los Angeles class submarine which was modeled with photos in the background and that one has about the same number of divisions front to back as U-Don's model. Notice how long the scale one is. You may use that fuselage as practice if you want to. You may find photos or drawings of the submarine on the web (even though they are kinda hard to find) and place them in a viewport in Blender as I did to model it. It may not be exactly perfect because I did it rather quickly but it is still very close to the shape of the real sub and you may modify it easily and make a whole model and even Page 200

publish it if you want to by using this as a starting point. Go ahead if you want to do that your have my permission. I hope that this additional file helps you to understand how to create a submarine better. Of course the Los Angeles class sub is a good one to start with cause its shape is kinda more regular and symmetrical and that is why it is a good demonstration model, for some other submarines the shape can be more irregular and you will have to work a little harder to create them. In more complex hulls it may be possible to use NURBS instead like in some of the other sea ships that I did. Character Paper Models So how do you deal with shapes that are more complex like organics? Such as characters? Characters and complex organic shapes or other complex shapes is something in which the low poly in one direction rule may not work as well in many instances and then it's usually better to put it aside and use the low polygon in both directions method of older 3D video games model creation (but it's not always the case). For character paper models it is usually better to use a low to medium poly resolution method in both directions and there are again plenty of free tutorials for low polygonal resolution 3D video games model creation for many different 3D packages on the Internet. Observe the next picture:

These Shadow and Sonic characters are from Paperkraft.net. You can get them here: http://paperkraft.blogspot.com/2006/05/sonic-hedgehog.html http://paperkraft.blogspot.com/2006/05/shadow-hedgehog.html Those are Shadow and Sonic the Hedgehogs models available for free on the Internet and I picked this photo in particular because the edges of the folds are very obvious in them and therefore you can see the polygonal detail much better and as you can see they are built using low poly res techniques just like in older 3D video games but despite that they still look very nice. Now take a look at this picture of a Lara Croft (from the Tomb Raider video games) game character paper model also available for free on the web:

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This model was created by user orcberto (from Alberto Modelos De Papel). You can download the model at this location: http://www.zelda-fans.com/archives/2006/01/papercraft-lara-croft-from-tomb-raider/ Notice how her arms and legs are kinda rounder despite the model being a low to medium poly one, well, actually, they are still a bit squarish in this example because it was the designer's choice but in another model by another designer they could be made rounder with cylinders and cones or altered cylinders and cones if the designer decided to do so and the reason I showed you that picture and told you that is because you have to realize again what I said to you earlier about not following things so literally and using judgment, it may be possible in some areas of a character model to use cones and cylinders to make some parts softer and not so square, in some character models you will observe how the designer improved some areas by making things rounder in such a way so again don't abuse the low polygon technique unless you want to do so for artistic purposes. Anyway I want to make clear here that I'm not criticizing that particular model back there cause I think that it looks pretty good and in this case I think that the creator of the model made good choices in the style he used to create that Lara Croft model so I think that what he did is just fine, I'm merely telling you about the different choices that you have in the design process. Look at the next character which uses a medium poly resolution technique and is one with pretty good detail because of that:

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Free Master Chief character paper model from the 3D video game Halo. This model was created by a user that goes by the name of billibob884. You can get this model here: http://billybob884.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d12mw84 If you click on Download File you will receive the Pepakura PDO file version but if you click on the link where it says: PDF of Pages 1-10 you will go to a page where you can download a PDF version of the model, then on that page click on Download File. Of course because this model is of medium poly resolution it is of more complexity in design and assembly so you have to know that, but in part this is because it is a sci-fi model that has an angular armor so doing it in a medium poly resolution is kind of the best way to do it, this is again one of our basic rules that as a paper model is of more detail and quality is also more difficult to design and assemble and this is a principle that applies to other model disciplines such as plastic models but in plastic models and other types of models it applies to a much lesser degree because a plastic model can have quite a bit of detail in its parts and yet still be pretty easy to assemble in many cases, where plastic models are usually much harder to do is in painting the details. See also that in some characters such as robots, characters with armor and weapons, exoskeletons and the like it may be possible to use some of the low poly in one direction techniques in the whole model or at least in some parts, and for some accessories that are non organic (like a weapon) the low poly in one direction technique may also be very handy so the main point here is that a model may be a hybrid of low poly in one direction and low poly in both directions techniques and of course this isn't limited to character models, this can be done for any model if you wish so but a lot of the time you will find character paper models that use the low poly in both directions method and for this reason you will also find at the moment of this writing many of these that have been translated mostly directly from a game model to a paper model. Page 203

Chapter 7 - A Bare Bones Way Of Creating Paper Models With A Computer

here is a commercial program that costs $29.00 called Cone Layout that will generate many kinds of cones including oval cones and it allows the bottom and the top (the top only in truncated cones) of the cones to be at an angle. It will generate a flat pattern for the cone that can be used for paper modeling or sheet metal unfolding and this one allows the pattern to be saved as an EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) file in addition to a DXF file and also as a coordinates text file. It handles the issue of generating cones without doing manual geometric and trigonometric calculations or the process of surface development. Of course this a very bare bones way of creating paper model designs but it's an option if a person is intimidated by the idea of learning a full blown 3D program he or she might try using a tool like that to assist them because unfolding some simple low poly parts manually is not that difficult if you learn surface development but doing cones manually can be a very time consuming affair and a program like this will do this part for you. I tested this little program and it produces DFX files that can be opened with CorelDraw X3 and X4 just fine. CorelDraw also opens the EPS files that it produces. In CorelDraw X3 you just have to connect the lines at the main corners if you import the DXF file and all the lines in the EPS file but that is not a a big deal cause you just click the Create Boundary function once and it creates the connected pattern automatically and then you just delete the older imported pattern. Open Office Draw opens the DXF pattern just fine, I couldn't find a way to make the EPS file work but at least with DXF it works. Inkscape doesn't have EPS import yet and unfortunately the DXF file that Cone Layout produces doesn't import well in it (it comes out as blank) but you can use the free CutePDF Writer software to print the flattened pattern to a PDF file from Cone Layout and then import the PDF into Inkscape and it will work just fine and this in turn gives Cone Layout PDF export capability. In Illustrator CS4 I couldn't make the DXF file work but it opened the EPS file just fine and it also opened the PDF file created by CutePDF Writer just fine too. Also here in Illustrator CS4 I used the Simplify function (Object menu, choose Path and then select Simplify...) with a setting of 100 in Curve Precision and after that the pattern has far less control points but it preserves the shape well. It may be possible to use this function with a pattern generated by the Blender unfolding scripts or by any other unfolder. CorelDraw X3 and X4 also opened the PDF files created through CutePDF writer just fine. DoubleCAD XT opened the DXF file just fine but not the Eps and it doesn't have PDF import capability yet. At first I couldn't open any AutoCAD files in Solid Edge 2D but then I figured out that you have to run the configuration wizard first as explained in the section titled: The Confusion Between UV Texture Unfolders and Paper Modeling/Others Unfolder in chapter 2 Modern Paper Model Design. After doing this procedure it will open AutoCAD files just fine including the the Cone Layout patterns. You can get it here: http://www.pulserate.com/ Once you load the resulting file into a program like CorelDraw it might be a good idea to draw over it because sometimes when you load the resulting DXF file into CorelDraw it can be too full of nodes (number of bends in Cone Layout) depending on how many bends you gave it or if you left the bends at none as it defaults cause if you did it won't have the division lines in the middle but it will have a lot of nodes and you have to either clean it or draw over it. It's fairly easy to draw over it anyway like by creating another layer and then drawing in it the part with smooth curves using what you imported as a template, the important thing is the correct shape of your cone parts which the small Page 204

program calculated for you. It might even be a good idea to know how to do unfolding completely manually (drawing it with pencils and paper) because if one day you find yourself without a PC you can have something to fall back upon, in my opinion it is better that an engineer or draftsman learns how to do technical drawing the old fashion way before learning how to do that on a computer, I think that it's best to have both skills but this is just an option and it is a personal choice and today with the low price of personal computers it is becoming easier and easier to get one as time goes by, well, you can get one of those Acer mini notebooks with Windows XP Home for around $320 bucks at the moment of this writing (CompUSA has even been selling them recently around such a price for a while) and that's more than enough to do paper model designing, yes you can do it in one of those, the screen is small but sharp and about the only other thing that you may need would be an optical mouse because I think that it's easier to work on graphics software with a mouse than with those touchpads and then leave the touchpad for on-the-go use but you can get an optical mouse for $7 today in some places and again that's an option. And then there are desktops PCs today that are also very cheap (today you could get one more than powerful enough for paper model design for about $300) and flat monitors that are very cheap too (less than $100 I've seen some older ones at CompUSA for about $70 sometimes) and with some of the free software out there you can do a whole lot, commercial software is still superior in general but a lot can be done with the free tools and some open source programs are getting very, very good lately. There is the possibility to use manual unfolding techniques but using those techniques in an illustration program such as Inkscape, CorelDraw, Illustrator or the like or a 2D CAD program because even if you use manual techniques such as those doing it digitally accelerates the process enormously and the result is much more sharper, cleaner and much easier to color, modify etc. but I suggest that if you do that at least use the Cone Layout program that I mentioned already to assist you cause like I said it will save you a lot of time. The last thing that you will need to do to these parts is to add the gluing tabs and the artwork but this is relatively easy to do inside your illustration software. You can do a lot more than what at first sight you may think with boxes, cylinders, cones and spheres (as I explained before spheres can come from cones and remember the example of the goblet made with cones and cylinders) if you want to design paper models with this simplistic approach, and if that's the case experiment with it a bit and you may see what I mean with that and remember what I told you about studying how the good models from the Internet are put together but start with studying the simpler ones. If you don't want to use this rustic approach then consider learning 3D software, Google Sketchup may be a good start because it's very easy to learn (it's one of the easiest to learn and much easier than Blender though Blender is far more powerful) but ultimately it's a matter of personal preference. Learning how to use a 3D modeling or 3D CAD program can take some time but once you know how to use one it will be far, far easier to design a paper model.

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Chapter 8 - Recent Open Source Software Improvements

here has been a lot of very important open source software improvements lately. Blender.org has just released version 2.53 Beta of their 3D program Blender but the full stable production version, release 2.5x, which is due in a few months (it was originally announced for summer of 2010 but I think fall or winter of 2010 is more realistic now) is the one to look for next. From version 2.49b to 2.5x final it will have some mayor changes that they been working very hard at for quite a while, as a matter of fact the version 2.49b release was an interim release to quell users thirst while the big changes come and one of the mayor changes that the new Blender will have (you can already see that in Blender 2.53 Beta) it's the one thing that has been under a lot of criticism by the 3D community, the interface. The Blender community have been rewriting a whole lot of code (they have been going over the whole thing which is close to half a million lines of code) to be able to do some important internal changes that will also allow the interface changes that they wanted for the program and that's just among many other things. They are redesigning the interface completely including a whole new set of icons and many other things and it will look a whole lot more like software such as 3D Studio and Maya which are highly regarded in general by the 3D software community. I know that some Blender users will disagree to that last thing I said about Blender being better because it looks more like many other industry standard 3D modeling programs and I respect that but many, many others agree with it, I believe that is the majority as I've seen in many Blender forums, besides, Blender 2.5x final will have its own set of interface improvements that are all its own and unique and the most important thing is that programs functions have been organized in a more logical way now so that issue may mean nothing anyway. Blender will also have many, many other changes and improvements, too many to list here that are not related to the interface after all, you just have to wait a few months, and even if it takes a little longer than what was previously announced I think that the wait will be well worth it. In the meantime you can still use Blender 2.49b which is fully functional and in which the unfolding scripts still work (I already mentioned that they don't work yet in Blender 2.53 Beta early in this book but at least now there is the new Export Paper Model From Blender unfolding script for the new version). The Gimp is already a terrific bitmap editor even if a lot of people still don't like the fragmented windows interface (I don't and I still use it a lot because I like the software in general) and this is something that they are about to fix too in the very next versions of the program. In version 2.8 you will have the choice of a single window or a multiple windows interface which will be available relatively soon (it is expected around Fall of 2010) and it will have some other important changes in that version, anyway as it is it's still a very usable piece of software that is very, very capable and Inkscape is already very usable and the new version 0.47 which has been released recently with many improvements is even better and that's just a few of these open source and free programs. The chart next is the new modified roadmap for the new Blender. Notice that those steps of Beta 2, 3 and 4 have been merged into one in the new chart but as you will see in the quote after the chart they are mentioning that there could be several Beta releases until there is a final 2.5x version, it seems that the project has advanced quite a bit anyway:

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The following is the new announcement that came together with the modified roadmap and it is again directly quoted from the Blender 3D official web site: Work on the Blender 2.5 series has been proceeded alongside the Durian open movie project, along with continued collaborative work from the worldwide developer community. While the alpha versions were great for testing, we expect Blender 2.53 Beta to be a completed implementation of the currently existing UI features, with at least most 2.49 functionality back, and ready for documentation. The beta period - which might consist of several releases - will lead up to a fully stabilized and production ready Blender 2.5x release. Once this stable release is ready, new development can kick off again, integrating new tools such as BMesh and rendering features as developed during the Durian open movie project (GI), which will be all released as 2.6x versions. Software development planning is always tricky, no real dates can be pinned down! Aim is to get beta releases out each 6 to 8 weeks, until it's stable. Hopefully in 2010!. The new version of Open Office now offers anti-aliasing!* (anti-aliasing is a method of handling the jagged edges of bitmap based images as to make those jagged edges blend into the objects beneath or into the background. It makes those edges far smoother and it gives the illusion that the image was made with a higher resolution) and I'll show you more about anti-aliasing further ahead. In version 3.1 of the Open Office suit (it is currently in version 3.2.1) it acquired anti-aliasing and now if you look at the vector graphics in the programs you will see the anti-aliasing. You will notice that the edges are smoother. Office Draw now also anti-aliases the graphics when exporting to a bitmap format like JPG, great! It was badly needed! That's good news for people that know how to use the program cause they don't have to learn another program to have anti-aliasing unless they want to learn something more powerful like Inkscape, CorelDraw, Illustrator, Xara Designer, or the like. Terrific work from the Open Office team, people really needed this. Remember that there is still the option of saving to PDF and keeping the work fully in vector format but the bottom line is that if you don't want to use this method which I highly recommend you have another choice. Version 0.8 of K3D has been released recently and according to them it has several important improvements. According to the information in their web site one of them is that the data storage for geometric meshes was completely rewritten allowing the program to render one million polygons at interactive rates. Another is that it has introductory support for NURBS and it also has introductory support for the open source LuxRender rendering engine. It has other improvements like a new/rewritten support for importing 3DS, Collada, OBJ, MD2, Ogre, PLY, STL, and SVG files and other improvements. Visit their web site for more information. A new open source illustration program has appeared in the scene that seems very promising and it Page 207

is called sK1. Its web site is located here: http://sk1project.org/. At the moment it is available only for Linux but Windows and Mac versions are planned soon. The first public release is version 0.9.0 which is touted as a stable version but if you look at the program developments roadmap (it is a link at the right in their main web page called sK1 Roadmap) you will see that in version 0.9.3 a Windows (a Win32 port) version is scheduled and a Macintosh port is scheduled too in version 0.9.4. I have not tested the program yet but my first impressions with what I read is that the program is very promising and it looks pretty complete and capable for an illustration program which is a first release specially if you compare it with some other open source programs that have been out there for a long time so I think that we should keep an eye on this one to see how the project goes. This is good news for the illustration community and for the paper modeling community too of course and it should be interesting to see later on how this program compares with Inkscape and with commercial illustration programs.

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Chapter 9 - Other Basic Things That A Designer Should Know and Remember
Include Calibration Lines

If you include calibration lines people can calibrate to their printers and the modeler always knows what is the intended size of the model. This should be two lines, a 1 centimeter line and a 1 inch line labeled as such respectively with the title above or below them reading also: Calibration Lines, most likely in a corner of one of the paper sheets or better yet in all of them. This is particularly important if you publish your models in a bitmap format like PNG, JPG or the like because the Dpi (Dots per inch also known as Ppi Points per inch) to total resolution of the image ratio which is what determines the size of a bitmap is many times confused by designers (too many times) leaving the modeler to guess what was the intended printing size of the model, the GIF format makes that even worst because many programs default the GIF files that they open to about 72 Dpi and I believe it's because it is a problem of the format so don't use it, it is for web page graphics but for paper models this is obsolete and it has less colors which makes it a poor choice nowadays. Calibration lines fix these problems if the designer makes a mistake when specifying or setting the total resolution in pixels, the Dpi resolution and the measuring units of the paper size (more on that further ahead). For scale models calibration lines are even more important.

Try To Use The PDF Format

Acrobat Reader screenshot. Page 209

Try to publish your models in PDF format, it is becoming a worldwide de facto standard for electronic document publishing and even IPhones can read them. If your software doesn't allow saving in PDF format (and many modern software allow it) try using a software like the CutePDF Writer that I mentioned before to print your design to a PDF file that you can post in a web site for download. Have you noticed how many computers today have a PDF reader of one type or the other installed including Macintoshes, PC's and Linux boxes and others? Have you noticed how many documents you can download on-line in the PDF format? It's all over the place. It's also very flexible. It allows the inclusion of vector, bitmap and even 3D models (even though that last one is a bit more difficult to do) or a combination of all of those. It makes the life of the paper model builder easier. It is also a way to deal with the sheet size problem of bitmap formats, to do away with the guessing, but do even better yet, make your design in PDF format and include the calibration lines. More and more software are adding the capability to write and read PDFs every day, Open Office allows saving of documents in PDF format and it already has a plugin that you can download and install separately that allows the importation of PDF documents and as a matter of fact that plugin was used in the creation of this book and during the creation of this book it was updated and improved so now it's even better and it's most likely that it will get better soon, it still needs improvement but at least it is already there and getting better.

Specify The Scale Of The Model

Please try to specify the scale of the model if it was designed to scale (cartoon style models are many times not designed to scale for example but many others are) and specify it at least in the file names but even better, specify it in one of the parts and/or instruction sheets/files or both. Another thing that you may try is to create models in common scales. For example, in cars common scales are 1/32, 1/24, 1/18, 1/16, 1/12, 1,10, 1/8, etc. and there are common scales for spaceships, sea ships, airplanes and many other things. If you try a web search you can find a list of them, try common model scales, there is a good one here in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scale_model_sizes. At the very least if you make a series of cars for example you could try to make them the same scale, of course this is depending on your purpose cause you could have something like a couple of 1/18 cars or a couple of 1/16 cars and then ten 1/24 scale cars etc., modelers seem to like this. Well, this is just a rule of thumb and there are situations in which you may think that it is more appropriate to use a noncommon scale so that's all right, but if you can you could try to do it in a common one. So what is scale? What does scale means? Simply put it means that if a Ferrari car is 1/18 scale (it is also commonly written as 1:18 as you may know) and you put 18 of them bumper to bumper without spaces you would have the length of the real size Ferrari and if you put 18 of them side by side without spaces you would have the real width of the real life Ferrari and the same for the height.

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1/18 scale die cast Ferrari F355, as many hobbyists know, a very common scale in die cast scale models today.

Include Wide Margins

You should include margins wide enough in your models to compensate for printing area problems. Some printers have quite a wide area around the page where they cannot print, some printers can print edge to edge but by losing some quality and there are other differences. Make a blank area around the model parts at least 3/8 of an inch wide or better yet 1/2 an inch wide. That takes care of most of those problems for the modeler. Do not create margins by trimming the total size of the page, if a page is letter size for example leave the size at full 8.5 x 11 and do the margins as white area around the parts and/or any ornamental borders (more on this ahead).

Try To Use Only A4 Or Letter Size Paper Whenever Possible

Use only A4 or letter size paper, those two sizes are virtually the world wide standard for paper models, most people can find A4 (8.26 x 11.69 inches) or letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) cardstock rather easily. Other sizes like tabloid may be available but these are harder to find in cardstock material and few people have a printer of that size to print sheets like that. To make matters worst, modelers sometimes have to or like to buy matte and glossy material and with those two sizes that already makes four types of paper they have to buy to have all the bases covered unless they decide to print in one of those two types only, if you add another size to the mix like legal size (8.5 x 14 inches) that makes six types and leave alone other types of specialized paper that modelers sometimes buy like metallic, colored paper or similar fancy/special types. Keeping most model designs in those two sizes keeps the hobby more inexpensive and easier for people. If you are going to design a large model break the model into smaller parts that fit those sizes and just create more pages. Most large size models are really done in this fashion. If you look in the web you might find a full scale Terminator T-800 paper model, yes movie size and the sheets of paper are in one of those two sizes. The model just have more pages. That is the best way to do them. An exception to this is when you are going to publish your models in a physically printed material using a printing press instead of a PDF file or other type of format for electronic download because a physical press (a print shop) can print in larger sizes and models can be published in larger sizes or even non-standard sizes cause they can custom cut the material, it's not a problem or when you are designing something like a product package which goes along the same line but for on-line publication A4 or letter sizes are Page 211

ideal and you can try to use a size of those two that is more appropriate for the area of the world in which you are, for example if your model is mainly intended for the US then try to use letter size, if your model is intended mainly for the Japanese public use A4 but of course Internet published models are really cosmopolitan and people all over the world can download them so this is a secondary thing, now, if you want to do it better yet make your models available in both sizes, A4 and letter size like the people of Canon do with their free paper models.

The previous picture is of an Epson Workforce 1100 wide format printer. This prints up to 13 x 19 (Tabloid 11 x 17 plus). Printers such as these would be great for paper models but unfortunately very few people have one at home. So the most common sizes that people have access to at home are usually A4 and letter size, in a distant third is legal size but it's also harder to get cardstock in legal and tabloid size.

Do Not Use Excess Compression

Do not use excess compression for bitmap models or models that include bitmaps. I've seen many beautiful models that were spoiled because the model designer compressed them way too much. Paper model sheets are NOT Internet page images so they do not need that much compression because they don't have to display that fast. That was the purpose of using medium to high compression for web page images, because web page designers did this to accelerate web page download and display specially for modem users. Paper models do not need anywhere near that much compression. You can publish them with higher quality compression settings for those that are in bitmap form or that contain bitmaps like those with bitmap textures. You may say: But if I use less compression the models take longer to download So? Let me ask you this question: How long does it take to download a paper model in comparison to the time it takes to build one? I rather wait 10 minutes to download a higher quality model than 1 minute for a poor quality one because it probably will take several days or at least many hours (depending on the model) to build it! So don't over-compress models, it is not necessary unless you have very limited hosting space. I use compression settings of about 92 96 instead of the setting of 70 80 or even less that I sometimes see in some models if what I designed has to include bitmap textures. If the file size worries you too much then read the next tip after this paragraph. Even modern web pages are already starting to use higher resolution and less compression in their images because we are already moving into higher bandwidth and even those people using modems can wait a bit longer to download a higher quality model that will probably take days to assemble. I'm not saying that you Page 212

should not use compression, I'm just saying that for paper models it's not necessary to compress them excessively or to compress them as much as images for web pages, don't you as a paper model designer want people around the world to see your creation with quality? I have sort of a simple personal motto that goes like this: High quality, many, many times, makes its own propaganda. Try it, and with time, you will see.

Try To Create Your Model In Vector Format

Try to create your model in vector format only unless your skills are way better in bitmap editors and/or your complex or high quality textures require or demand that the model is created and/or published in a bitmap format or in a vector/bitmap combination in a PDF or SVG or similar format (SVG files can also contain bitmaps and even animation despite being mainly used for static vectors because the format was designed with the idea of being a substitute for Flash but to be a public domain standard). Many, many high quality paper models are designed in vector only because it has several advantages like:

Resolution independence - You can print your model at 600 Dpi in a lower res printer or you can
print it in a 4000 Dpi printer if you have one and with the higher res printer it will look better and sharper.

Scalability Many paper models designed entirely in vector format can be scaled up or down by
the modeler without loosing quality.

Space savings Vector format models are usually much more compact in file size than their
bitmap counterparts.

Editability If the paper model designer wants so, he or she can publish the model without any
type of encryption so paper modelers can load it in a vector software like CorelDraw and modify the model rather easily like changing colors, changing line thicknesses, creating models with different logos or insignias etc. This can be done many times in bitmap format published models too but it is usually much easier to do in models published in vector format.

Cleanliness Models completely in vector format do not degrade in quality when compression is
used (zip compression) so they do not have compression artifacts.

Give The File Names A More Adequate Or Descriptive Name

Instead of something like 155dhgf377.pdf or h476d56f87.jpg. Try something like: CarPartsLetterSize1.pdf, CarInstructionsLetterSize1.pdf, if possible, like I just showed, describe the paper size to be used in the file name. If you have two versions like a version with folding lines and a version without folding lines try something like: CarPartsNoLinesVersionLetterSize1.pdf, CarPartsLinesVersionLetterSize1.pdf, Do you see? Don't worry about the file names being that long anymore, this is not the era of DOS anymore and most modern operating systems can read long file names like that without a problem and it's time to move forward with that.

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 Be Careful With The Page Size

Create the page size exactly to the chosen paper size such as A4 or letter size. That means that if you use letter size for example and you publish your model in PDF format, when you go into the properties of the document in Acrobat Reader (Ctrl+D) your page size should be 8.5 x 11 inches exactly. If you follow the guidelines here you should have a page that is 8.5 x 11 inches from edge to edge. Do not make the error that too many designers do of publishing the model with a different page size other than the full chosen paper size. I've seen models published in PDF format that were intended for letter size for example but somehow when you check the properties of the pages in Adobe Acrobat Reader you get exactly double the size, like 17 x 22. In many cases it wasn't that the model was intended for 17 x 22 tabloid size, it was that somehow the page size was not specified correctly in the creation process. Always set your page size first before starting your design and in bitmap editors this is separate from the total resolution of the image cause total resolution of the image plus page size is what determines Dpi resolution. A similar error that you see paper model designers make many times is to leave margins around the sheets that are not related to the white or blank space normally required to clear the printers printable area problem, meaning that they cropped the JPG image, the PNG image, the PDF size or the like and made the page size less than A4 or letter size, something like let's say 1/2 an inch or any other measure less all around from A4 or letter size to use as safety area for printable area problems so they ended with a letter size page measuring for example 7.5 x 10 inches or something similar or if they used an A4 page size they ended with a 7.76 x 11.19 inches page size or something similar to this depending on the margin size that they decided to subtract from the sheets (see the next illustration). This IS NOT the proper way to do this. If the designer does this it can confuse the modeler because the modeler doesn't know about it and might try to use one of those stretch to print area or stretch to paper size functions of their printer driver or not and now they have inconsistency because the printing area of printers varies from model to model and different models will end with different part sizes around the world and if the model was designed to be in scale it will be lost somewhat and that's something that some paper modelers will object to. This is one reason to include calibration lines in the model sheets, cause it will allow the modeler to know by measuring any of those two lines after printing if they got the size that the paper model designer intended for it to have. What the model designer should do is to create pages in full A4 or letter size, meaning that in the properties of their image in their graphic editor of choice (and that includes bitmap editors) the page size should be 8.26 x 11.69 inches for A4 and 8.5 x 11 inches size for letter size exactly without cropping the page or the image to a half inch less around or 3/8 inch around or similar, that margin is to be left within the A4 or letter size page as a blank or white space around the parts and/or before any decorative edge or border that the designer put around the parts for presentation (again, you can take a look at the illustration after the next two paragraphs to see better what I mean and the measures for the incorrect one are just one example of course, those measures could be different). Then the designer should include a text file named something like HowToPrintThisModel.pdf or at the beginning (in the first page) of the model parts there should be instructions specifying something like the following (the text between the blue lines): How To Print This Model When you print this model print to No Scale or No Scaling, do not choose something like Stretch to Page or Stretch to Printing Area. Do choose if available Center to Page if you think it is Page 214

necessary. If for any reason all this white area around the parts is not enough to clear the parts and make them print completely inside the printable area of the printer then you might use the printer driver option of scaling it down a little using the scaling by percent function (I believe most if not all printer drivers have this option if you don't know how to use it consult your printer manual). This reduction percent doesn't have to be too much, normally you may scale all the pages to something like 97 percent or perhaps 94 percent and you may find that it will probably be enough and if it ain't then use a number a little smaller but it is improbable that it will be that much if you ever have to use it at all. Try to print first one page alone so you don't waste ink and paper and once you have determined the correct percent print all the remaining ones at that percent. If you reduce or increase the design by using the scale by percent function, that is a separate thing from functions like Stretch to Page, Stretch to Page Border or Stretch to Printing Area so even if you do use the scale by percent function make sure you set the page to the setting of No Scale or No Scaling as it was first indicated. So set the page to No Scale or No Scaling and then set the adjustment by percent function. Remember that if the model is designed to scale this will be affected by the adjustment and the scale will be lost somewhat, this doesn't mean that the model will be damaged cause with the percent adjustment the vertical and horizontal proportions will be preserved, it just means that it will be printed at a different size and at a different scale other than the one specified by the designer. If you are a designer and wish to use that paragraph before just like that, do so, you are allowed. I included it with the models I designed in a separate PDF doc. What observing these guidelines can give both modelers and designers is consistency. If these guidelines are followed by both designer and modeler a model printed in Japan or Germany or Hawaii by anybody will have the exact same measurements that you the designer intended. Any small difference created by printers can be compensated by measuring the calibration lines and adjusting the size of pages very slightly with the percent adjustment of the printer driver by adjusting in very small numbers, that's usually what it takes to correct printer differences. In my opinion this should be the standard method that should be used to publish models on the Internet cause it will take care of those problems with models that you unzip and just don't know how large or how small you should print them. Sometimes you as a model builder can guess it by the proportions of the parts, for example: you import one of those bitmap sheets in CorelDraw and see that it's larger than letter size but when you adjust it proportionally (to adjust vertical and horizontal at the same time while maintaining proportions) to fit the page you see that it fits the proportions of letter size or A4 size perfectly and you realize that this was their real intended size but the designer didn't specify the Dpi information and/or the page size correctly when saving the page so sometimes it's too hard to tell so the modeler has to make an educated guess. You as a designer should use these guidelines to eliminate such problems for the builder once and for all.

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As seen in the example up there it's the way it should go and it doesn't matter if it is a PDF or a bitmap type sheet it goes full size and if it is A4 it goes full 11.69 x 8.26 size, if it is letter size it goes full 11 x 8.5 size and the same for any other size.

If You Decide To Publish The Model In A Bitmap Type Format Anyway

If you publish your model in a bitmap format such as JPG or PNG try to make the resolution at least 150 Dpi 24 bit color and then use compression (but remember, don't overdo it). Too bad, too many beautiful models out there in which you can see that the model designer created a terrific quality original artwork either in bitmap or vector but published it at 72 Dpi ruining it totally in my humble opinion. To make matters worst some of those also had over-compression and/or lack of anti-aliasing. The aliasing on top of the other problems made some designs a mess. I've seen some sheets in which I observed that the original artwork was a terrific and a well designed artwork only to see it turned into bathroom tiles with such a low resolution of 72 Dpi and made worst by too many compression artifacts and/or lack of anti-aliasing. If you publish models in a bitmap format please use at least 150 Dpi and as a bare, bare minimum 125 Dpi but no less than that. Don't damage a well done model that you spent so much time in creating (it does take a bit of time and effort to create a really good paper model design doesn't it?) by publishing it in such a poor resolution. You can go as high as 300 Dpi 24 bit but above that it makes the pages too big in size in my opinion and at 200 Dpi it's a good compromise of quality and size but if you are too concerned about file size at least use 150 Dpi. The models can still look beautiful at that resolution but they should be anti-aliased, specially below 300 Dpi. Low res is becoming day by day a thing of the past, this is the year 2010 and it's time to start putting a bit better quality in our models and again if you are concerned about file size consider doing them in vector lines if you can, it's the best of both worlds, quality and low file size as a rule of thumb. That's why vector artwork is so widely used today in paper models. Page 216

 Precautions With Bitmap Formats And Page Sizes

If you do publish model sheets in a bitmap format of any type watch out for those three things in particular: paper or page size (which again should be 8.26 x 11.69 inches for A4 and 8.5 x 11 inches for letter size), Dpi resolution (please at least 150 Dpi at 24 bit color and as a bare, bare minimum 125 Dpi at 24 bit color* (24 bit color is 16,777,216 colors and this is the mayor world standard for color at the moment until HDRI* [higher number of colors or values] imaging becomes the mainstream standard in the future), 24 bit is adequate for most paper modeling unless you have access to a system with higher color resolution in the creation process and you can print in a hexachrome printer (a six color printer) or similar printer with a color process of more than 4 colors or in a printing press with more than the normal 4 color method of color separation for printing of C,M,Y, K Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Key = Black) but this is usually reserved for professionals in the graphic arts field and normally intended for the print shop or service bureau. A lot of software still do not have full support for this. It is not exactly easy to have a workflow that comprises higher color resolution from input (like scanner or camera) or creation (your image generation software) to output (printer or printing press), it is usually a very high end thing. To begin with, most computer monitors today still can't display more than 24 bit color and that's just part of the problem. Anyway, total resolution of the image should be as follows, and I give a small table to show what it should be so it has the correct total pixel size: Page size A4 125 Dpi - Total resolution = 1032.5 x 1461.25 pixels exact, 1033 x 1461 pixels rounded. 150 Dpi - Total resolution = 1239 x 1753.5 pixels exact, 1239 x 1754 pixels rounded. 200 Dpi - Total resolution = 1652 x 2338 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded. 300 Dpi - Total resolution = 2478 x 3507 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded. Page size letter 125 Dpi - Total resolution = 1062.5 x 1375 pixels exact, 1063 x 1375 pixels rounded. 150 Dpi - Total resolution = 1275 x 1650 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded. 200 Dpi - Total resolution = 1700 x 2200 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded. 300 Dpi - Total resolution = 2550 x 3300 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded. Whenever using these Dpi settings check to see if your total resolution corresponds to something close to one of these numbers cause at this Dpi and sizes those pixels are pretty much a constant. As you can see not all multiplication leads to perfect integer numbers, that's OK, use the rounded numbers, what most bitmap editors will do is to compensate by adjusting the page size (the measures) slightly and you will end with something like for example: in A4 size at 150 Dpi, it would be something like 8.26 x 11.693 (<--- that's a real number from The Gimp) inches or something similar. You see normally it would have been 8.26 x 11.69 as I set it at first but The Gimp adjusted the second measure to 11.693 at 150 Dpi. This was obligatory to compensate for the rounding of the vertical pixels from 1753.5 to 1754 pixels but don't worry about it because as you can see the amounts we are talking about are very diminutive and the page will be as close as possible to the correct 8.26 x 11.69 inches or (210 x 297 millimeters this is the real measure of A4 because A4 comes from the metric system and as you can see I already converted it to inches, for letter size its measure in millimeters would be 216 x 279 millimeters). The amounts on these tables was converted from millimeters first to inches for A4 so there is already a small margin of error with that but again this is negligible. This small amount disappears as a natural margin of error and it won't cause any problems for the Page 217

paper modeler because it's too small to amount to anything and the model will print precisely enough and again this is a reason to include calibration lines just as a fail-safe to compensate for differences in printing so the modeler can have a reassurance that he or she got the right size at the moment of printing which is something that he/she can verify easily by measuring any of these two lines with a ruler after printing a sheet. How do you obtain these numbers? Very easily, you take for example letter size paper at 300 Dpi so you multiply 8.5 inches x 300 pixels which gives you 2550 pixels and multiply 11 inches x 300 Dpi which will give you 3300 pixels and by using that method you can get the right number of pixels for any other Dpi resolution or paper size that is not in the previous table. So again, watch out for those three things when publishing your model: page size, Dpi settings and the total number of pixels that make up the image and when you save to an image format such as JPG or PNG, it will save the correct information if you set it correctly together with the image data so it can be retrieved by any software that opens any of those files. To be sure that your model builder doesn't run into problems with this try to save or publish your work as a PDF file and check in the Acrobat Reader or any PDF reader in the properties so the measurements are correct full A4 or letter size before you post it. Try not to use the GIF format, this format is obsolete for paper modeling and it is better suited for small web graphics but for paper modeling is not very good and in my experience with it with graphic editors is that it doesn't maintain Dpi information well and images done in GIF tend to default to 72 Dpi even if you specify other Dpi resolution when you save them, in addition GIF is limited to a maximum of 256 colors and when you save a higher color image to that format it will need to be reduced in colors to a maximum of 256 and dithered* (to rearrange the dots in certain patterns as to simulate the softer shading of a higher color image). A 256 colors dithered image is very compromised and in my opinion there is no reason whatsoever to use such a limited color format anymore because by using JPG or PNG with a little compression the images are reasonably compact in size for web downloading, GIF is for web page buttons, small animated graphics or thumbnails (and not continuous tone thumbnail images such as photographs because compressed and optimized JPGs are far better for that purpose and too many people mistake this already when doing web pages) and the like mainly but I believe that it no longer has a place in paper model design. There are other good image formats out there like Tiff and Targa, etc. but I suggest that you stick to JPG and PNG (unless you are a very knowledgeable professional in the graphic arts and know what you are doing) because they have become a more widely supported standard and they are more than capable for paper modeling so why use something else when most any serious graphic capable program out there can open or import these two rather easily? Make life easier for paper model builders please. Perhaps the other ones to watch out for are Jpeg 2000 which is the next generation JPG standard and it might become as widely used and supported in the future as JPG and PNG are today and it even support layers which is something that neither JPG or PNG supports and also keep an eye on OpenEXR which like Jpeg 2000 has support for multiple layers but this last one is for higher number of colors and it might take many years to become a mainstream standard if it does so, like I said just keep an eye on those but for the moment JPG and PNG seem to be the most sensible choices. Oh, if you eventually do decide to use the Jpeg 2000 standard or OpenEXR remember that the layers are for editing mostly and that most of the time when you publish a model in any of those formats you will have to remember to flatten* (flattening is the process of converting a multilayered artwork into a single layer artwork) the layers before publishing it because the multilayer file that you may have used for editing will have too big a file size and you will have to keep a copy of your multilayered file for editing purposes and then create a flattened copy for publishing. There maybe exceptions to flattening a file completely such as including a second layer of the artwork with a second color overlay or an overlay with different logos Page 218

or emblems or the like but in most instances you will have to publish your artwork in a single layer. I found that understanding the relationship between total image resolution, image size and Dpi is something that confuses some new digital graphic artists and some new paper model designers many times and I decided to write a free tutorial to shed some light into that. Trust me when I say that as simple and straightforward as this looks it confuses a lot of people. If you are a paper model designer I suggest that you do read it cause it may clear some things that can lead to incorrect document formatting at the moment of creating the final files to be published. You can download the tutorial in the same places where you can download this e-book. The tutorial was created in PDF format just like this e-book. Look for it in my Deviantart and Mediafire locations and the document is titled: ClearingTheConfusionBetweenTotalImageResolutionImageSizeAndDpiVersion1-1.pdf

You Don't Always Have To Make The Edge And Fold Lines Black!
You will notice that many designers have the tendency to always use black as the color for the edge and the fold lines of the parts, WRONG! There is the choice of using a color slightly darker than the color of the part and that means that if the part is yellow you may use same yellow color but darker (with more black and/or perhaps more magenta) or if it is red or orange you can use brown for the edge or fold line, if it is green you may use darker green etc. Why? Because the parts look better when assembled, the somewhat darker color sort of blends better the edge or fold, after all in real life objects, many of those 3D edges do not have a line there at all so why make them black which sorts of makes it too visible? which sort of mars the 3D edge of the parts? Use a somewhat darker color for the edges and fold lines instead. In the case of very dark colors what you do is that you invert the technique, you use somewhat lighter colors for those edges and fold lines so if the part is black you can use a dark gray that is light enough to be distinguished when printing. This is somewhat the opposite of the problem, that too many times designers use full white for the edges or fold lines on black or dark colored parts and this is something that it's not necessary. This technique is something I did for the edge of the parts of my Ford 32 33 hot rod paper model and it makes the model look better when assembled. Let me show you a couple examples from the Ford:

You may have noticed that in the example illustrations in the book I used black lines but that is because for the purpose of the book I didn't need to make the lines like in my Ford car model because all the patterns in the book were for educational purposes and I wanted them to be seen very clearly instead but in a final artwork I would employ this technique. Page 219

Those two are clipped sections from some pages of my model and you can see clearly there the use of this technique. And you see here too the use of this method for the fold lines. Don't worry too much about the color being so light that it cannot be distinguished too well from the part color when printed at least for edge lines because after all it's very easy to tell where the color of the part ends and the white paper starts but for fold lines you have to be more careful that they are seen by the builder but don't overdo it cause fold lines that are too dark can also mar a design, specially when they are all black or all white. You should test these parts, you should print them so you can see if you are satisfied with how light or dark these lines are cause too many times the color looks way different from what you see on the computer screen and you might see a line clearly in the PC screen but when you print it it disappears almost completely and it can become useless specially for fold lines so test your parts, this becomes part of the prototyping process. I've noticed that this technique is something not well known in general in paper modeling cause way too many models abuse the use of black for those edges and fold lines and that's too bad, I hope that this book helps some people see that there is a good alternative. If you want to take a better look at other parts of the cartoon style Ford 32 33 hot rod or the other few models that I did as a reference for this technique you can find them here: Ford 32 33 and generic model display base (scroll down to the second yellow model car and the generic base is lower than that): http://www.jleslie48.com/gallery_models_other.html Also: Ford 32 33 and other models and things: http://pixeloz.deviantart.com/ In Deviantart press the Browse Gallery button to see the other things. Also: http://www.mediafire.com/? sharekey=bef98dda6119ec7a1bee9a6e9edd9c763226eac23d9aef9ab8eada0a1ae8665a

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 Anti-aliasing
Try to make your model designs anti-aliased. Anti-aliasing is, for the new graphic artist, the smoothing of the edges of lines and figures by mixing or blending a figure or drawing object's edge against the background or any other object beneath it. It's a way to make a foreground object's edge blend with the background giving it a smoother appearance. If you look at computer graphics you see that sometimes you can see those staircase steps on the diagonal lines, specially on older graphics. Most modern graphic software fix this by applying anti-aliasing of one type or the other to graphic images, objects in layers, selection marquees, etc. Objects in most modern vector software are antialiased right there in the design window of your program. Programs like CorelDraw, Illustrator, Xara Designer, Freehand, Inkscape and others anti-alias the display (in many of them the anti-aliasing can be toggled on or off by selecting some item from a menu or a key press or key press combination) so you can see better your pictures as you edit them and they anti-alias objects as you export them to a bitmap format like JPG or PNG, there is usually a box that you should mark or that is already marked by default in many of those export settings windows that appear when you are trying to export something from a program like CorelDraw or the like and they also anti-alias something when printing before sending it to the printer driver. Adobe Acrobat Reader anti-aliases vectors lines when it displays the pages of a document and when it prints. If you use a software like Open Office Draw version 3.0 or below and you export your artwork as JPG or PNG it will not anti-alias the images and that will degrade the quality of the artwork. Open Office version 3.1 or later has full anti-aliasing in the display and when you export or print your artwork. If you export your artwork from Open Office Draw to PDF format it will be anti-aliased because like I already mentioned Acrobat Reader will apply anti-aliasing to any vector artwork automatically and it will print it with anti-aliasing also. So even if OO Draw 3.0 or below doesn't have anti-aliased output you can give it to it by just publishing your vector artwork in the PDF format directly from the software. Any vector software that allows you to export or save your artwork as a vector PDF will benefit from this trick (unfortunately not all software do this, some export the vector artwork as a bitmap PDF loosing the vector advantages in the process but the big majority of them are capable of creating vector PDF files).

The letters S to the left are not anti-aliased and the ones to the right are. The upper ones are the Page 221

same ones but enlarged 300% so you can see a bit better what anti-aliasing does. In the enlarged example the anti-aliased letter S looks blurred when you look at it but at the correct size it looks much better than the letters without anti-aliasing. Actually in the example image above the small letter S to the left may appear a bit more softened or blurred than it really is (it is not anti-aliased at all) because at the moment of creating the PDF version of this book the image compression may have blurred the sharp edges a bit. Nevertheless notice how the edge blending trick that software employ in this fools the eye and makes the letters to the right appear so much nicer than the letters to the left and deals away with those jagged edges. This example was created in The Gimp which allows you to make letters with and without anti-aliasing. Software such as this employ anti-aliasing in many other tools too and in vector programs such as CorelDraw and others they anti-alias all artwork by default but globally meaning that in a program such as CorelDraw when you turn anti-aliasing on all vector artwork on screen looks anti-aliased and vice versa but in bitmap editors you can have a mixed aliased and antialiased artwork at the same time but for the purpose of paper modeling the ideal thing would be to antialias everything except perhaps some part of some texture artwork if the artwork demands that it should go like that by the artist. In vector programs such as CorelDraw or Inkscape when you export your artwork to a bitmap format it can be anti-aliased or not, they usually give you the choice to save it either way because even though it's more desirable as a general rule to have the images anti-aliased there are a few exceptions in which a graphic artist doesn't want anti-aliasing so the program gives you a choice of how to export in a bitmap format but for a paper model it is usually better to save to a bitmap format of your choice (like PNG or JPG) as anti-aliased work. And remember that when you save or export vector artwork to PDF format or when you print vector artwork to something like CutePDF Writer as a PDF format all that artwork will be anti-aliased because when you open it in the Acrobat Reader it will be anti-aliased in the screen or at the moment of printing automatically. If you are a new graphic artist and still do not understand the concept of anti-aliasing I suggest that you try to find information about it with a web search, there is plenty of information about it on-line. If you find the information or explanation about it too complex or too technical move to another web page that has the info in layman's terms, or a simpler explanation. Most mayor paint programs (bitmap editors) have anti-aliasing in many of their tools so try to learn how to use this, it's really very easy to do and once you get the hang of it and see the results you get you won't want to go back to do it the old way. Experiment with anti-aliasing and soon you will get the basic concepts and how to do it. There is really no excuse anymore to publish aliased artwork, most modern graphics software provide good anti-aliasing tools or methods specially the commercial ones and even free open source programs such as Inkscape already support it fully and The Gimp bitmap editor which is also free open source and is fully capable has anti-aliasing everywhere. Open Office Draw didn't support anti-aliasing until recently as I indicated before, it was falling behind in that respect and it was criticized for that often but luckily they have already fixed it. Anti-aliasing is nothing new, digital artists and illustrators have been using it for many, many years now, witness how it is used nowadays in Windows XP, Vista, Mac and Linux GUI's (Graphical User Interfaces) and Icons and in many other graphics in the web, software interfaces, digital artwork of all types, etc. Many graphics software of today including bitmap editors, vector programs and 3D programs of all kinds use it extensively and provide many tools to do away with aliasing so you as a designer should start to get acquainted with it already if you haven't and you don't want to be left behind.

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Modern 3D game consoles anti-alias 3D models in real-time. Of the last generation consoles the PS2 is an exception but its graphics still look pretty good because old CRT TV screens are kinda blurry in comparison to computer monitors or modern HDTV sets and PS2 graphics can still look pretty good without anti-aliasing even in a HDTV but they would have looked even better if the hardware had been able to support it, the new PS3 supports full anti-aliasing, just like the Wii and the Xbox 360. Modern 3D computer graphics cards for PCs provide full anti-aliasing support for 3D models so if the software supports it 3D model edges look sharper. The quality of real-time anti-aliasing in modern 3D graphics cards has been improving over the last few years. 3D modeling programs and CAD programs can fully anti-alias their artwork when rendering (even though in 3D rendering this is a CPU issue and not a graphic card issue because in rendering anti-aliasing is software based except for some modern exceptions that are starting to appear now) and with some high end graphic cards and some 3D software it's possible to anti-alias the vector lines even while editing but this is just starting to be used at the moment. When you export things as a PDF or similar it can be anti-aliased so the point that I'm trying to make with this is that aliasing in my opinion is already pretty much obsolete and should be handled by the paper model designer.

Free Bumble Bee paper model from the new Transformers movies. You can appreciate in this model the great quality that a paper model can have when it's designed by an experienced and professional designer and built by a pro paper model builder. This beautiful model was created by Cludio Dias from Brazil. It is available from his web site PaperInside.com. The address is here: http://paperinside.com/bumblebee/

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Conclusion

espite this book showing mostly a way to create paper models with Blender 3D and CorelDraw X3 (or X4, X5) one thing that you may have realized by now through all this is that there are many different methods for paper model creation. You can also take for example a 3D model created in Blender and unfold it with Pepakura. You could take a model created with 3D Studio Max and unfold it with Ultimate Papercraft 3D. You could draw something by hand by using drafting surface development techniques. You could use mathematics such as calculus, geometry and trigonometry to get the correct measures of your polygons and draw your design by hand. It is possible to take such a hand drawn model and color the parts right there on paper or they can be scanned and colored in a program such as Photoshop or The Gimp. You could take a hand drawn model and scan it and trace over it in an illustration software and then of course color it in the illustration software itself or convert the vector artwork afterward into a bitmap format and texture and color it in a bitmap editor such as those already mentioned or any other. Another way it can be done is by hand drawing and designing it inside a vector illustration software or in a 2D CAD program using surface development drafting or mathematics as mentioned before or no math or surface development at all if the model is simple enough. You could import a low poly 3D model from a PC 3D video game into a 3D modeling program such as Lightwave or MilkShape and then export it to an unfolder program like Pepakura. You could create a model in Google Sketchup and unfold it with the commercial plugin Waybe or use the freely available unfolding script. You could create a 3D model in a full power 3D CAD program and then use an internal sheet metal unfolder to unfold it right there and then convert your flattened parts into a bitmap format and export your artwork to a bitmap editor for final coloring and then save it from there to PDF format through CutePDF writer page by page. You could save that final bitmap editor artwork as JPG or PNG perhaps and then import those pages into Illustrator and then save it as a multiple page PDF (as bitmap PDF) or the same but with CorelDraw instead or other illustration programs that allow multiple page artwork creation, this can also be done in Open Office Writer, other word processors and in other programs that import bitmap images. Another thing you could do is to create a 3D model in SolidWorks, unfold it with the sheet metal unfolder and lay it out right there in SolidWorks using the 2D drafting functions of the program then save it or export it as a PDF artwork right there from SolidWorks itself the whole process in a single program. Remember that many 3D programs that do not include the built in unfolding capability can be combined with scripts, plugins or stand alone unfolder programs like Pepakura or Ultimate Papercraft 3D and if you are not sure if the combination will work you can try demos of these software, many of them have fully functional 30 days demos so that's something that you may be able to put to good use, so try around and see what you like. Do you see? Many methods. You have to keep in mind that converting a program format to the other is not always a perfect process, sometimes when translating for example a 3D model from a 3D program to the other the model doesn't come out exactly the same and you have to do a bit of fixing, when that is going to happen or what combination of software are problematic with that is something that you have to find out for yourself with experience and that's another instance in which demos come in handy. Graphic programs usually import and export a wide variety of formats so if one type of format doesn't work or is too problematic you may try another until you find an import/export combination or software combination that works. Many will work just fine so just try until you find one that does. Converting between bitmap formats like JPG, PNG, TIFF, Targa, etc. is usually not that big a deal but conversion from a vector format to another is known to have issues here and there and that happens between 2D vector formats such as PDF, SVG, EPS etc. or between 3D vector formats such as AutoCAD DXF, Collada, Mayas's OBJ format, etc. Some conversions are just better than others so like I said you have Page 224

to experiment with these until you get a combination that works right, a lot of them work good enough. Remember too that something like Pepakura doesn't necessarily have to be the last block on your workflow chain of programs and many people think that that is always the case. The design process can end right there in such a program but not necessarily so because you may use something like Pepakura to unfold a 3D model that you created elsewhere and you can finish the job right there between your 3D modeler and the external paper unfolder because you can have your flattened patterns with textures and everything but you may also create a 3D model with no textures whatsoever and then unfold it in Pepakura as a white or blank model and then texture that flattened pattern in a graphics editor of your choice of the illustration type such as Illustrator, Serif DrawPlus or Xara Designer or of the bitmap/photo editor type such as Photoshop or The Gimp if you like creating the textures in a bitmap editor. So you see here that in this first type of workflow in which an external paper unfolder program is involved you can texture your model in your 3D modeler and then just unfold it with textures and everything already applied in the external paper unfolder or in a second case you can texture the blank pattern after going through the paper unfolder in a graphics editor. In the first case you would have to apply textures to your 3D model through the normal UV unfolding process (texture unfolding) or any other method like procedural textures (but procedural textures usually have to be baked to convert them to UV so they can be used by paper unfolders) for example but notice that in the second case an external unfolder (like a paper model unfolder such as Pepakura) then becomes a substitute texture unfolder by designer choice, you see the two processes are similar but the texturing process has a different order and if you think that the second process is harder because it goes beyond the external unfolder think again because in the first case you have to unfold twice, you have to UV unfold to give your model textures (if you don't use something else for texturing) and then you have to paper unfold in the external software unfolder and in the second case you unfold only once because your paper unfolder then becomes both the paper unfolder and the texture unfolder all in one cause you will use the pattern it generates to draw or paint over it, do you see? and in many cases I've seen better quality jobs from the second method. Your choice with this will depend in how you like to work. There are many, many combinations possible, is not like the way some new designers seem to think the process goes, that there is one specific way to do it or two, there are a whole lot of them! You have to find the one method or workflow that you feel most comfortable with, the one that adapts better to your knowledge and the one that works better with your software of choice if it involves software. Also as you can see, as a general rule it's a multiple software effort (again for those methods in which software is involved) it's usually a multi-program affair but as you can see in some examples I mentioned, it can be done with one single program, now, for most people it usually involves at least two. Find the method that works for you and learn little by little, take your time, it requires patience but once you start to get the hang of it it can become quite addictive. You may start with a workflow and then realize a different one that you like better. 3D modeling software can be time consuming to learn, they do have as a general rule a steep learning curve but it's usually best to know a 3D modeling program or learn one first and then start to design paper models, it's the approach that works best for most people, if you are a newbie and feel a bit intimidated by the subject you may try to start with Google Sketchup cause it's one of the easiest to learn 3D modeling programs, if you are serious about 3D modeling and you are an artist that want to learn serious 3D modeling anyway and you feel that you are a capable person then you may jump straight into learning something like 3D Studio Max which is very powerful or the free open source program Blender that is very capable so you learn two things one after the other, 3D modeling and then paper modeling. Page 225

Many people start with a 3D program and then jump to another that they feel can be better for them, learning a second 3D program can be far easier than learning the first one because a lot of the same 3D modeling principles apply to many 3D programs. Blender is a very capable piece of 3D software but unfortunately some people seem to believe that it is kinda hard to learn, now in the following months that will probably change completely after the new version 2.5x is complete so that will help a lot, the new Blender 2.5x is a dramatic change from the old Blender and I think that it will improve people's perception of Blender quite a bit and as I mentioned in many parts of this document there is a large quantity of tutorial material available for free out there in the web about 3D, illustration and for virtually all kinds of software and of course there are a few paper modeling tutorials out there too and now this book joins the group, and there is also the option of asking questions in forums which sometimes helps a lot. I hope that the material contained in this book is useful to you. Happy designing!

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Glossary
24 Bit Color 24 bit color is 16,777,216 colors and this is the mayor world standard for color at the moment until HDRI* (see HDRI in glossary) or any other higher color standard of imaging becomes the mainstream standard in the future. 24 bit is comprised of 8 bit for every RGB (Red, Green & Blue) color channel. By using 8 bits in every channel it makes possible to create 256 gradations of color for that channel and when combined with the 256 gradations of color for the other two channels it makes the total of 16,777,216 color combinations possible. Sometimes you hear the term 32 bit associated with 24 bit color (24 bit + 8 bit for alpha which is transparency) but this just means an additional channel with 256 gradations of alpha transparency. Do not confuse these 32 bits with 32 bits per RGB channel which is for much higher number of colors in images such as HDRI because that would be really 96 bit of color + 32 bits for alpha for a grand total of 128 bits. 3D Printer A rapid prototyping* (see Rapid Prototyping in glossary) machine that works by printing tridimensionally in contrast to an image printer which prints bidimensional images. These printers work by laying a special material layer by layer one on top of the other until they form a fully tridimensional figure or part and they create this out of a tridimensional file that was made on a 3D program such as a 3D CAD program or others. This is considered a positive process because the part is created by adding material and not by subtracting material like in CNC* machining (see CNC Machine in glossary). Anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing is a method of handling the jagged edges of bitmap based images as to make those jagged edges blend into the objects beneath or into the background. It makes those edges far smoother and it gives the illusion that the image was made with a higher resolution. (See more on the subject on the Anti-aliasing section of chapter 9 - Other Basic Things That A Designer Should Know and Remember). Baking (Texture Baking) Generally refers to the process of recording as an image, some aspect of the material or mesh characteristics of a model. One value of this is that certain kinds of material parameters can take longer to compute and apply to a model than an image texture, so it saves rendering time. Baking is usually done once a material or mesh is finalized. In texture baking, for example, what is originally a procedural texture can be recorded as an image. Sometimes various "channels" of a material can be consolidated into a single image, simplifying the number of texture images used. Material colors applied in Texture Paint mode can be saved to an image. Texture baking can also help with disguising seams on a UV unwrap, a somewhat complicated but very useful process. Banding Banding is the generation of ugly division bands that sometimes appear in the place of smooth transitions or gradations from one color to the other. These ugly bands have a tendency to appear more in areas with darker transitions or said in another manner in transitions toward dark colors. Bezier Curve This is the same type of curve with manipulation handles as those in illustration software. Beziers are curves and lines that are made with mathematical descriptions and they are the same ones that vector* (see Vector in glossary) illustration software use and they differ from the straight vertexes, segments and polygons that comprise a 3D mesh* (see Mesh in glossary). Booleans They are basically functions in 3D programs that allow you to add, intersect or subtract a part to or from each other. So let's say that you create a sphere and a cube and you put the sphere in a position in which half of it goes through the cube, you can then apply a Boolean function and have for example the sphere hole subtracted from the cube so when you remove the sphere, the cube has a hole on one side with the shape of the sphere or you could add the sphere and the cube and come up with a Page 227

cube that has a protruding half sphere on one side or you can do many other similar things. CAD CAD stands for computer aided design which are digital computer drafting, designing and creation tools that can accelerate a lot the process of creating or engineering a new product. They come in many varieties but mainly in two basic categories, 2D CAD programs which are to a drawing board or drawing table what word processors are to typewriters and they also come in the much more powerful tridimensional flavor which is becoming quickly the de facto standard way of designing in the industry today. CNC Machine CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control which is a fancy name for milling machines that are operated through electric motors that are controlled by a computer instead of the old method in which they were controlled by hand by using rotary levers. The advantages for the computer controlled ones are enormous like more precision and automated repetition of a similar part and others. With the ability of special 3D software and CNC software they can carve or sculpt a tridimensional part that was designed on some 3D software programs such as 3D CAD and others by converting those files first to a special format that CNC machines can interpret. These are considered negative process machines because they subtract material to carve a part from something such as a block of billet aluminum, wood, wax and many other materials. These machines are considered rapid prototyping* (see Rapid Prototyping in glossary) machines and also production machines because they can do both things rather well depending on circumstances. Compound curves More complex than usual curved surfaces. More exactly, curved surfaces that bend in two directions at the same time such as those in a sphere where it is necessary to create more than one section or part that when combined or glued with other parts allows you to create an approximation of those curved surfaces in paper modeling. They are different to simple curved surfaces such as those in a cylinder or cone because those only bend in one direction. CPU Central Processing Unit. The main microchip on a computer such as the Intel i7 or the AMD Phenom II which is responsible for the big majority of computations in a computer. Create Boundary This is a function in the program CorelDraw in versions X3, X4 and X5 that creates an outer shape automatically for all the shapes that are selected saving a lot of time. Dithering To rearrange the dots in certain patterns as to simulate the softer shading of a higher color image. Dithering is a technique that is also used to simulate more colors in low color images (such as 256 color images) by mixing the dots of two or more colors in a pattern that appears as a new color to the eye. It was used much more in earlier computer times when computers had less colors in their display systems but now it is being used again in a similar way to simulate HDRI (see HDRI in glossary) colors somewhat in 24 bit displays. The tradeoff in dithering is a bit more graininess or noise in the image but a lot of times even with this tradeoff it produces very good results. Dithering 24 bit images can help eliminate the ugly banding (See Banding in glossary) in images. Blender in particular has a Dither: setting in the Output tab of the Scene (F10) panels that can help a lot with that. Extrusion In computer graphics it is a process in which a polygonal shape is pulled through a third coordinate or third dimension by a specified measure or visually with the help of an input device such as a mouse through a 3D program interface as to give that shape depth therefore changing it from a flat 2D geometric shape into a full 3D geometric shape. Also some group of faces or objects that are not flat and are already positioned in a tridimensional way can be extruded or pulled to form a different shape. In addition to that some polygonal faces or parts from an existing 3D model can be extruded to modify Page 228

its shape. Face (see Polygon in glossary). Flattening Flattening is the process of converting a multi-layered artwork into a single-layered artwork. GPU Graphics Processing Unit. This is a microchip that is dedicated mainly to the task of computing 2D and 3D graphics in a computer but also other things. Today GPU chips are starting to compute more than just graphics, they are also being used to compute physics such as the physics of a game (like wind, water, explosions, etc.) and they are starting to be used for other general computing tasks that were usually reserved for the CPU* only (see CPU in glossary). Graphics Hardware Graphics hardware is the electronic equipment usually inside a computer that allows the machine to compute 2D and 3D graphics more quickly and that is also connected to the monitor to allow the display of the images that it generates. This is usually in the form of several chips but particularly a special chip called GPU* (Graphics Processing Unit) that are soldered/placed on a card or board that usually plugs inside the PC chassis or that also can be soldered/placed on the motherboard* (see motherboard in glossary) of the computer itself but that has an external connector (or more than one) that is used to plug the monitor(s) in it (in the case of those chips being placed on a motherboard the display connector[s] is/are on the motherboard itself). GUI or Graphical User Interface A GUI is a method utilized by most modern operating systems that enables a user to interact with their computer in a graphical way with the assistance of input devices such as a mouse, a touchpad, trackball, keyboard and others. This is done mostly by controlling a cursor (a special icon usually shaped as an arrow but that can be customized to be other shapes or that can change shape according to the use) that allows the user to point to and interact with graphic elements on screen such as menus, icons, buttons, scroll bars, etc. and other things like text in order to activate and/or manipulate different kinds of operating system or software functions. It contrasts with older methods of interacting with a computer, mainly with character based systems which utilized an alphanumeric keyboard and a character based display system (no graphics) to interact with the computer by writing specific commands that told the operating system or software which functions to perform. HDRI High dynamic range image. It means images with a much greater range of values between the dark and light portions of the image than standard computer graphics and it can also be images with a much greater range of colors. There are different methods to create such images and there are photographic methods and computer graphics methods. In order to create or to store such a final high dynamic range image it is necessary to use a more advanced image format such as Radiance HDR format* (see Radiance HDR in glossary), OpenEXR* (see OpenEXR in glossary) or others. These type of imaging formats can store pictures in which more than 24 bit* (see 24 bit in glossary) colors are used. In HDRI imaging you could have up to 32 bits per RGB channel for a total of 96 bits instead of the usual 8 bits per RGB channel of 24 bit imaging used in the mainstream today (this can be up to 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 colors instead of 16,777,216) but depending on the format used. This translates into octillions of colors or values instead of millions and also because of that images created in HDRI formats do not suffer from banding* (see Banding in glossary) like 24 bit images do and other problems. Sometimes you hear the term 32 bit associated with 24 bit color (this is 24 bit + 8 bit for alpha which is transparency) but this just means an additional channel with 256 gradations of alpha transparency. Do not confuse these 32 bits with the 32 bits per RGB channel which Page 229

is for much higher number of colors in some HDRI images because that would be really 96 bit of color + 32 bits for alpha for a grand total of 128 bits. Instancing To create an instance instead of a copy and what that does is that when you make any changes to the original model those changes are duplicated in the instanced model. Instanced duplicates remain linked to the original model or shape and as you make any changes to the original model or shape those changes will be duplicated exactly in all the instanced duplicates no matter how many they are even if you make a hundred or a thousand instances. Mesh Or 3D Mesh A mesh is a 3D model in its most basic form of vertexes and/or segments and/or polygons. This contrasts with models or shapes that are made of curves or other types of objects such as NURBS* (see NURBS in glossary). Curves and the like can be usually converted to a mesh but meshes are usually much more difficult to convert back into curves. Motherboard The main circuit board inside a computer where you usually find several things such as the socket where you place the CPU, the memory sockets and connectors for many things such as graphic cards, sound cards, hard drives etc. Node Nodes (they are sometimes called control points in some programs) are the points in a vector object that you use to edit and change its shape such as the corners of a square or the ends of a curve or the middle points in a curve or line that also allow you to modify its shape. In vector illustration programs you can usually enter a node or control point edit mode/tool in which you can click them to be able to see their respective control handles which allow you to manipulate the shape of the object, line or curve to which the node or control point belong. Normals They are sort of like the direction toward which the polygonal faces or vertexes that make up a 3D model point to. They are represented in Blender by some small blue lines (their size and color can be adjusted) that are invisible by default but they can be made visible or invisible again with a button called Draw Normals which is located in the Editing panel (F9) in the Mesh Tools More tab but you have to select an object and enter Edit Mode (Tab) to see it. That button is for the polygonal faces normals. The button below it which is called Draw VNormals is to toggle the visibility of the vertex normals on/off. NURBS Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines as they are also called. This is a fancy mathematical name for surfaces that are generated with curves and controlled or shaped through some special nodes* (see Node in glossary) and handles. They are usually used to generate complex curved surfaces of some 3D models such as the hull of a boat but also for other things like the fender of a car, etc. OpenEXR It is an advanced bitmap type image format that can store a much greater number of colors or values than 24 bits* (see 24 Bit in glossary). OpenEXR is the second most widely used HDRI type format and probably the best. It supports up to 32 bits per RGB channel (4,294,967,296 colors or values per RGB channel and alpha channel for a total of 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 possible colors or values + alpha). It also supports unlimited layers by just writing them sequentially. It is used a lot in the movie industry and in other professional areas such as professional photography and professional 3D animation. Open Source Software This is software that is released free of charge to the public under a special license agreement. Open source software is created by the on-line community which usually creates a group of associated people that connect themselves usually through the Internet but also through other Page 230

means such as telephone communication or other means or even special meetings and they dedicate themselves to the update, development and preservation of the software and the maintenance of the official software related web site(s) even though many of them do this out of their spare time. Open source software is called like that because their coding is also open to the public which means that you can access the software from a web site but also its programing code for your own modification. You can also redistribute the modified or unmodified software but while preserving the original licensing agreement which means that you have to release the modified or unmodified program as open source too so you can't profit by it. Package Manager A software system in Linux operating systems by which you can download, install, upgrade or remove software for a particular Linux version. There are several of them which vary according to a particular Linux distribution and many of them posses today a GUI* (see GUI in glossary) that makes them easier to use. So in many Linux operating systems if you want to install, upgrade or remove an existing software you usually do it through a package manager in which you can do a search in several ways for the particular software that you want to install, upgrade or remove and when you find it you can indicate to the package manager what you want to do with the selected software and the package manager takes care of downloading, installing, upgrading or removing the selected software automatically including the installation or upgrade of any library (additional necessary software) that your selected software requires to operate properly. Pica A pica is a unit of measure from the graphic arts or printing press world (a typographic unit). It is 1/72 of its respective foot, and therefore it is 1/6 of an inch. The pica contains 12 points. Plugin A plugin is a special kind of software that you install so it attaches itself to another software to give it additional capabilities. It is similar to a script* (see Script in glossary) but a script is usually smaller and simpler with less capabilities than a plugin. Point A point is a measurement unit that comes from the graphic arts or printing press world (a typographic unit). It is used mainly for type but it's also a unit of measurement that can be used to measure things like line thicknesses, etc. It is a subdivision of the larger pica* (see Pica in glossary). Nowadays, the traditional point has been supplanted by the desktop publishing point which is also called the PostScript point, which has been rounded to an even 72 points to the inch (in the metric system 1 point = 0.353 mm). In either system, there are 12 points in a pica. Polygon Polygons are the basic geometric shapes that make a 3D model. Those faces or surfaces that make the outside shape of a 3D model or mesh* (see Mesh in glossary) are the polygons. They are usually flat as in the case of triangles but not necessarily so as in the case of quads* (see Quads in glossary). Pre-Rendered (See Rendering in glossary). Primitives The primitives are the basic geometric shapes that 3D software provide as a starting point for the creation of many models, they can be a cube, a cone, a cylinder, a torus [a donut], a plane [a rectangle] or many other basic geometric shapes. Blender primitives in particular can be expanded with the use of scripts* (see Script in glossary) that provide additional shapes. Procedurals or Procedural Materials These are materials created without textures and just with material settings inside a 3D program. A procedural texture can have better tridimensionality cause if you break a mesh in half for example it can simulate the effect that happens when you break a real Page 231

tridimensional object in half in the real physics world in which the texture pattern follows the shape of the real object and this contrasts with textured materials in which editing the shape of the 3D object or shape can have a detrimental effect in the textured artwork in which case it may need to be redone or adjusted. Procedural materials do not suffer from some of the ugly repetitive patterns that sometimes occur with the use of some tiled textures (textures that are repeated many times similar to the arrangement of bathroom tiles) in materials at the edge of a texture tile where one tile meets another. Python - It's an open source* (see Open Source Software in glossary) computer programing language available from http://www.python.org/ and the one in which Blender 3D is written. Blender scripts are also written in Python and several of them require the separate installation of full Python in order to work. Blender 2.5x to 2.6x will include its own full Python integrated so it will no longer require a separate installation as Blender version 2.49b still requires. Many open source applications are written in this language which has become quite popular nowadays. Quads or Quadrilaterals Quadrilaterals as they are also called are polygonal faces with four vertexes. In 3D programs you see quads but underneath they are always two triangles, quads are always formed by two triangles. This is better explained in the section called: A Common Misunderstanding About Quads And Triangles in chapter 4 - Some Important Fundamental Principles Not Well Understood. RadianceHDR An advanced bitmap type image format that can store a much greater range of colors or values than 24 bit* (see 24 bit in glossary) imaging. This format was the first HDRI* (see HDRI in glossary) type format and therefore one that has a lot of support from many different programs. It stores information as RGBE which means that it's stored as one byte (8 bits) per RGB channel plus one byte for exponent value that is shared among the three RGB channels therefore creating the equivalent of 32 bit total (4,294,967,296 colors over four billion colors or values). This is not as many colors or values as OpenEXR* (see OpenEXR in glossary) can store but it is much better than the standard 24 bit colors used mostly today. RadianceHDR doesn't support alpha like OpenEXR does but alpha can be created as a separate file (to be used as a blocking mask) for processing outside the original program as can be done with other image formats that do not support alpha natively such as JPG even though this is more limited. Rapid Prototyping Rapid prototyping is a way to manufacture 3D test parts very quickly and even some final production parts in some instances using very sophisticated equipment such as 3D printers* [definition in glossary], CNC machines* [definition in glossary] and other similar equipment. This is in contrast to the older manual prototype parts manufacturing methods that were far slower, more difficult and less precise. Real-time Animation Animation that is calculated on the fly, at the moment. This type of animation has to be calculated and displayed usually at least over 20 times per second (most of the times, for most modern games is above that) but it starts to look much more fluid and smooth when it is above 60 frames per second. Render Farm That's the name given to a setup of multiple computers dedicated to the task of rendering* (see Rendering in glossary) 3D pictures which are connected with each other through a computer network. Rendering Rendering is a method by which a vector image is converted from mathematical vertexes, segment lines, polygons and/or curves to a pixel image. It is usually associated with 3D software which Page 232

create tridimensional models with vertexes, segments, polygons, curves and other methods and then generate pixel images through the process of rendering. Pre-rendered graphics is another name by which these renderings are called and they can take a lot of time to draw even a single frame, this time can vary from fractions of a second to even days or more depending on the complexity of the scene or 3D model, the desired quality of the rendering, the resolution of the rendering and/or the type of rendering method. This is different to real-time 3D graphics* (see Real-time Animation in glossary) such as those of a video game in which many frames of the animation are generated several times per second to allow interactive manipulation of a 3D scene or world. 2D vector illustrations have to be rendered too, what happens is that this is usually far less complex than tridimensional rendering and therefore usually much faster, this is performed on the fly at the moment of exporting or saving a 2D vector illustration to a bitmap type format such as JPG or PNG, it is also performed at the moment of printing. Rings Is the name of the vertical sections of the sphere primitive in Blender 3D software, it could be any other name in another 3D program. Score or Scoring Is to mark the folds of a paper model pattern by depressing them with a semi-sharp object as to make it much easier to fold without damaging the cardboard as many experienced paper model builders know. This makes the folding of paper model parts much more easier and it yields far better results. Different tools are used for this purpose, a blunt blade such as an old blade from a hobby knife or other types of knives, the edge of an empty mechanical pencil with the mechanical pencil used at an angle, the best in my opinion which is a kemper ball stylus (used for ceramic crafts) which comes with different ball tip sizes and other tools. It is usually guided by hand for curves and by a ruler (preferably with a metal edge) for straight lines. Script It's a piece of programing code that you can attach to another software to give it additional capabilities. It is similar to a plugin* (see Plugin in glossary) but it is usually much shorter and simpler than a plugin and therefore it usually has simpler capabilities. Seams They are specially marked edges that are used by unfolders of different kinds for the purpose of allowing the designer to have much better control of where the 3D model is opened or cut for unfolding. Segment 1. Segments are in 3D programs the lines that connect vertexes with each other. In meshes* (see mesh in glossary) they are always straight lines but in other types of objects such as Bezier curves* (see Bezier Curve in glossary) and NURBS* (see NURBS in Glossary) they can be curves. 2. It is also the name of horizontal sections of the sphere primitive in Blender 3D, it could be any other name in any other software. Sneaker Net To go from one computer to the other on foot to exchange files between computers by hand with files transported in a portable media such as a USB electronic memory device or other type of computer media. Surface Development That is the term that is used in drafting and engineering for the flattening of curved surfaces, for the creation of a flattened pattern from a 3D shape that can be used for cutting, folding, welding and/or assembling in sheet metal fabrication and/or for cutting, folding, gluing and/or assembling paper models and the like. Textures The artistic designs painted or laid out over the polygonal surfaces of 3D models and paper Page 233

models. Truncated Cones A truncated cone means one that doesn't end in a point and has the top chopped off so to speak. This truncation can be flat (perpendicular to the base) or at an angle. Unfolding Unfolding, Paper Unfolding or Sheet Metal Unfolding is the opening and flattening of the geometric faces or shapes of a 3D model or 3D shape as to make a cutting, folding, gluing (or welding in sheet metal) pattern for paper or for any other flat material such as sheet metal or others. Not to be confused with UV unfolding* (see UV unfolding in glossary). Unix Is an operating system that originated at Bell Labs in 1969. Unix has evolved as a kind of large freeware product, with many extensions and new ideas provided in a variety of versions of Unix by different companies, universities, and individuals. UV Unfolding Is the process of opening and flattening of the geometric faces or shapes of a 3D model or 3D shape as to make a pattern that serves as a guide for applying textures* (see Textures in glossary) or artwork to its surface. UV unfolding should not be used for paper model unfolding cause it sacrifices the proportions and sizes of the shapes for ease of use (see more information about this on the section called: The Confusion Between UV Texture Unfolders And Paper Modeling/Other Unfolders in chapter 2 - Modern Paper Model Design). Vector A vector illustration drawing is basically a drawing made of lines and curves which are saved by the software as a mathematical representation as opposed to a pixel drawing which is comprised of a series of dots. This mathematical handling is invisible to the user, the user draws things such as lines, curves, circles, pentagons etc. but beneath the software always keeps such a drawing as mathematical lines or curves and saves all those to a file and when the software opens it again it recreates those lines and curves exactly as the user laid them down in the page. The main advantages of these are mentioned in more detail in chapter 9 - Other Basic Things That A Designer Should Know and Remember in the section called: Try To Create Your Model In Vector Format. Vertexes Also called vertices in plural - from Latin which means corner. These are the corners points or the points that connect segments* (see segment in glossary) with other segments of your 3D geometrical shapes so a cube for example would have 8 of these. Even if they are usually connected with one another by segments they can be separate too without any connected segment (floating so to speak, still part of a 3D mesh but apart from it but this is usually unwanted). In the case of 2D vector* (see vector in glossary) illustration programs vertexes are usually called nodes or control points. Viewports A viewport is a rectangular region in computer graphics, it can have different definitions in different contexts but in the context of this book a viewport is a window in a 3D modeling or a 2D or 3D CAD* (see CAD in glossary) program through which you see, create and edit your design. These programs more often than not can have one or more of these viewports, for example, the viewport area on a program could show only one large viewport or it could be divided in other ways like in half to show two viewports, in four viewports, etc. and each of these viewports could show different angles or views of the design such as a top, front or side view or others and/or a perspective view of a 3D model (in fully 3D programs contrary to 2D CAD programs) from any arbitrary angle. In full 3D programs they can also show a view of the design from the angle or position of one or more 3D cameras that have been placed and positioned by the user in the 3D world. Virtual Printer Driver A virtual printer is sort of a fake printer because it doesn't have a real printer Page 234

in the physical form, it is just a software printer that creates a file instead of printing it physically to a media such as paper. You choose this one the same way that you choose any other printer driver as if it was a real printer but instead it will ask you to specify a file name and for a directory where to put that file and it will create a file instead. This file can be different things depending on what type of virtual printer software you have installed, it can be a PDF file or a bitmap format file such as JPG.

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Acknowledgments
All 3D renderings in this book such as the drawing table, the 3D Ebay logo, the Hello Kitty characters paper model simulations and many, many others were created with Blender 3D 2.49b and they were rendered with the Blender internal renderer. The following 16 images were not created by me, they come from the Internet to be used as examples in this book and as promotion of those models for their respective creators and promotion for the respective software companies for those screenshots. This book is completely free, so there will be no profit whatsoever made from the use of any of these illustrations. They belong to their respective owners and companies and cannot be used to make profit from them without permission from their respective authors/owners. They are all copyright of their respective authors and/or owners. I acknowledge and thank their respective creators in this list: Technical Drawing book image From Prentice Hall Publishing Pepakura screenshot From Tama Software 3D Studio Max 2010 screenshot From Autodesk AutoCAD 2011 screenshot From Autodesk VariCAD screenshot From VariCAD Xara Designer Pro 6 screenshot From Xara Group limited SolidWorks screenshot From Dassault Systmes SolidWorks Corp. MilkShape Screenshot From Chumbalum Soft ModelArt F-15 paper model Courtesy of Felipe Navarro ModelArt P-51 paper model Courtesy of Gerardo Escobedo Los Angeles Class submarine Courtesy of Joe Polchlopek Sonic And Knucles From www.paperkraft.net Lara Croft From orcberto (Alberto Modelos de Papel) Master Chief paper model From billibob884 in Deviantart Epson Workforce 1100 From Epson Bumblebee (Transformer) From www.paperinside.com p. 16 p. 17 p. 32 p. 34 p. 36 p. 39 p. 42 p. 61 p. 158 p. 158 p. 199 p. 201 p. 202 p. 203 p. 212 p. 223

I attempted as much as I could to avoid using pictures or images that belonged to other people and because of that I went through great lengths to create many of my own images precisely because of that and I also did it for the purpose of giving the book a better look and a more consistent one too even though with more time it could have been much better. Originally I had over 40 images that were not created by me and I reduced it to that small group. All other photographs, 3D renderings, illustrations, logos and screenshots in the book (all 278 of them) were created by me Angel David Guzmn of PixelOz Designs and are copyright of Angel David Guzmn and PixelOz Designs. These images are copyright 2010 of PixelOz Designs and Angel David Guzmn and cannot be used, duplicated, altered, sold, auctioned, redistributed or published in any way without permission from the author. This book is a labor of love freely given to the community and because of that it belongs in part to the paper model community so respect that and keep it as it was intended, free. Cover artwork was also done by Angel David Guzmn - PixelOz. All image processing, touch up and improvement was done too by Angel D. Guzmn - PixelOz. Page 236

The Last Starfighter Gunstar spaceship that appears in the Lightwave screenshot on page 33 is a free model available for download at http://www.scifi-meshes.com/ and was created by Scifimeshes.com member lancer. The house plan that appears in the DoubleCAD XT Pro screenshot on page 40 is a free plan from http://www.cben.net/ and was created by Architect Luis Zabala. The house model on page 99 comes from http://www.katorlegaz.com/ and is a free model that you can download there and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. The Star Trek Enterprise D ship in page 160 is a free 3D Blender model available for download at: http://stblender.iindigo3d.com/ and originally created by Sci-Fi Art and converted to Blender by Rashid Al-Marri. The blueprint beneath the ship was created by Angel David Guzmn PixelOz in Adobe Illustrator based on the original Star Trek The Next Generation blueprints by Rick Sternbach. The ocean texture used in the sea ships renderings on pages 197 and 198 was created by Colin Litster of Cog Films (http://www.cogfilms.com/). That texture is animated and it creates a very convincing ocean waves animation. The ModelArt airplanes photos, the Sonic and Knuckles photo, the Halo Master Chief photos, the Los Angeles Class Submarine photo and the Bumblebee Transformer photo are all used with permission from their respective authors. I could not contact orcberto from Alberto Modelos de Papel cause I couldn't obtain his e-mail, there was no such information cause orcberto's site in Geocities has been down for a long time and I don't know if it will come back ever so my apology to him for putting his photo here without asking him, after all like I said, it will be just promotion of his model and as you can see here he is credited for his work, if he request it I will withdraw and substitute that image from the book immediately and publish an updated version. I did as much as I could and as it was humanly possible to either create my own images or ask permission to use the very, very few that I didn't create. The B-Paperizer unfolding script included with the book was created by estmr Houka (Czestmyr) and is released under the GNU/GPL license version 2.

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Publishing

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