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Fundamentals Of
Paper Model Design
With Blender 3D & An Illustration Program

By Angel David Guzmán – PixelOz

1.0 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

All Rights Reserved

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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 Guzmán – PixelOz. All
Rights Reserved. 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 Guzmán 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 website 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 websites, 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..........................................................................................29

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............................................................................................36

Some Commercial Bitmap Type Image Or Photo Editing Software .................................................38

Some Free 2D CAD Software............................................................................................................39

Creating PDFs With CutePDF Writer.................................................................................................41

Unfolding Paper Models With Sheet Metal Unfolders.......................................................................41

A Possible Alternative, A More Economic Option.............................................................................43

The Confusion Between UV Texture Unfolders And Paper Modeling/Other Unfolders...................44

B-Paperizer Script Installation............................................................................................................48

The Blender Unfolding Scripts Controls............................................................................................51

Chapter 3 - The Methodology Of 3D Paper Model Creation..............................................54

Chapter 4 - Some Important Fundamental Principles Not Well Understood.............57
The Most Basic Shape - The Cube.....................................................................................................57

Other Flat Faced Parts........................................................................................................................61

Handling Compound Curves - The Biggest Problem In Paper Model Design...................................64

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 The Two Directions Of A Compound Curve......................................................................................73

A Common Misunderstanding About Quads And Triangles..............................................................79

Higher Resolution Textures For More Quality...................................................................................93

Learning From Other Paper Model Designers....................................................................................95

Smoothing And Professional High Polygon Resolution Paper Model Creation................................96

Combined High Polygons And Low Polygons.................................................................................115

The Subsurface Division Problem....................................................................................................116

Low Polygon In One Direction Only Tricks....................................................................................119

Using Path Extrusion........................................................................................................................124

Exceptions To The High Poly Modeling Techniques.......................................................................128

A Little More On How To Separate Some Parts..............................................................................130

Chapter 5 - Internal Reinforcements Of 3D Paper Models...............................................137

Most Common Internal Reinforcements..........................................................................................137

Material Thickness Compensation...................................................................................................140

An Old Common Internal Reinforcement Trick...............................................................................141

3D Internal Reinforcements.............................................................................................................143

Model Interiors.................................................................................................................................144

Chapter 6 - Designing Some Simple Models..............................................................................145

Designing A Simple Cartoon Paper Model Airplane........................................................................145

Designing A Simple Airship.............................................................................................................153

Creating A Simple Sea Ship.............................................................................................................156

Waterline Sea Ships..........................................................................................................................163

Instancing And The Mirror Modifier................................................................................................168

Unfolding The Hull Of A Boat Model..............................................................................................170

Handling The Gluing Tabs At Curves..............................................................................................176

Overlapping Tabs And Fixing Bad Looking Corners.......................................................................187

A Submarine.....................................................................................................................................190

Character Paper Models...................................................................................................................191

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Chapter 7 - A Bare Bones Way Of Creating Paper Models With A Computer........195
Chapter 8 - Recent Open Source Software Improvements................................................197
Chapter 9 - Other Basic Things That A Designer Should Know and Remember...199
• Include Calibration Lines.................................................................................................................................199

• Try To Use The PDF Format............................................................................................................................199

• Specify The Scale Of The Model.....................................................................................................................200

• Include Wide Margins .....................................................................................................................................201

• Try To Use Only A4 Or Letter Size Paper Whenever Possible ......................................................................201

• Do Not Use Excess Compression....................................................................................................................202

• Try To Create Your Model In Vector Format...................................................................................................203

• Give The File Names A More Adequate Or Descriptive Name......................................................................203

• Be Careful With The Page Size.......................................................................................................................204

• If You Decide To Publish The Model In A Bitmap Type Format Anyway.....................................................206

• Precautions With Bitmap Formats And Page Sizes.........................................................................................207

• You Don't Always Have To Make The Edge And Fold Lines Black!.............................................................209

• Anti-aliasing.....................................................................................................................................................211

Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................215
Glossary.......................................................................................................................................................218
Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................226

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Important Note About Words With Asterisks

T 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 physical 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

T 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

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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

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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 Guzmán - PixelOz

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Chapter 1 - Some Things To Clear First

M 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 Adobe
Illustrator. In Illustrator 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 and X4 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 some 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
available for paper model creation and to tell you some basic things that you need to know in 3D paper

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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.

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 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.

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Chapter 2 - Modern Paper Model Design

T 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).

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 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 them. 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 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.

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 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 on-
line 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. 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 – Now in 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):

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/cad-addict/700b17a13099b02129604e5ad2d622c5

Pepakura Designer – by Tama Software ($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 Paperkraft 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 from home web site.

Ultimate Paperkraft 3D import file formats:

• Collada (Dae)
• Autodesk (Fbx/3ds)
• Autocad (Dxf)
• Lightwave (Lwo)
• WaveFront (Obj)
• Google SketchUp
• DirectX

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 • 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
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 or CorelDraw or the free open source Inkscape.

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 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 (Čestmír Houška) 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
bit but only with Python 32 bit. Blender 2.5 to 2.6 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 2.5 Alpha 1, it's likely that their respective authors will fix the

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scripts for the final Blender 2.6 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, then pressing 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 your model in one of
the corners it will be removed by the Remove Doubles function and the adjacent segments to those
double vertexes will be joined then (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 go
to the editing panel (press F9) and then go to the Mesh* Tools section (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) and click the button there (it's called: Rem double) and that “welds” those double vertexes
together. The number besides the Rem double 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 Rem
double 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 make up 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 all Normals Outside (this also takes care
of those ugly black spots and/or lines that sometimes appear after editing a model in Blender).

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 Ob Data – Ob means
Object) to put the scale factor to 1.0. You can see the scale factor in the properties window that you can

Page 23
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 appear. 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 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 group 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 has been
separated into another group that you have to glue and assemble to then attach it 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 selecting the scale manipulator 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 to 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
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

Page 24
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 and CorelDraw make rearrangement of the parts very easy with the Smart Guides (in
Illustrator) or the Dynamic Guides (In CorelDraw) which are very, very similar in both programs and
both 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
pivot center and then you can move the pivot 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:

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.

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

Page 25
 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 rotating handles.

Page 26
 Here the rotating handles and the pivot center have appeared.

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

After that the pivot point is perfectly aligned to the center of the corner node.

Page 27
 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 rotating handles and the pivot center 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:

To activate the Smart Guides in Illustrator you go to the View menu and select Smart Guides or
press the keys Ctrl+U.

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

Page 28
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 pivot 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 new version of Xara that was just released shortly ago would
include it but I was disappointed to see that it was not the case, for Xara 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 this
version, 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 is still a very powerful vector illustration software but I wouldn't give up the CorelDraw
Dynamic Guides or Illustrator's Smart Guides after using them, oh no, I like them too much, perhaps if
the users of those 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
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.

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

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 K3D 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
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

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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
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 Paperkraft 3D, they may also be
used with unfolding scripts or plugins if they are available but I don't know if there are, perhaps:

3D Studio Max – From Autodesk. Retail price is around $4,000.00 but it's possible to get it for a
few hundred dollars less in some retailers of the product:

http://www.autodesk.com/

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 3D Studio Max 2010 screenshot.

Softimage XSI – From Autodesk. Retail price (Windows versions) for Softimage XSI 7.5 is
$2,995.00 at the Autodesk web site and $4,695.00 for Softimage XSI Advanced 7.5 from home web
site too. Again you can get a better price from some retailers of the program.

http://www.autodesk.com/

Carrara – From $90.00 to $275.00 from home web site depending on the version, available here:

http://www.daz3d.com/

Cinema 4D – From Maxon, around $1,000.00 street for the basic package (probably more than
enough for paper modeling, of course) and around $3,500.00 street for Studio Bundle full version:

http://www.maxon.net/

Lightwave – From NewTek ($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 Lundström Design ($795.00 retail). It is a combined 3D modeling and

unfolding program. It comes for Windows and Mac.

Home page:

http://www.touchcad.com/

FormZ – From AutoDesSys ($1,120.00 street) regular version. 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 about about $1,420.00 street.

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 ($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.

MetasequoiaLE – Is free but the full Metasequoia version costs $45.00 from home web site. It is a
very simple 3D modeler distributed as shareware but is highly compatible with Pepakura Designer.

This is the web address:

http://www.metaseq.net

Direct link to English page:

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 http://www.metaseq.net/english/index.html

Some Commercial 3D CAD Software

Autocad – From Autodesk. Retail price is around $4,000.00 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 2010 screenshot.

Rhinoceros – Sort of a hybrid 3D CAD and modeling program in one ($999.00 retail, $780.00
street). 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
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 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/

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 Rhinoceros 4 (Rhino) 3D screenshot.

TurboCAD Pro Platinum – From IMSI ($1495.00 retail, $1,100.00 - $1,295.00 street) (I believe
the Pro Platinum version includes unfolding sheet metal functions but drop them an e-mail and ask
them if it includes both the unbend and unfold functions to be sure), TurboCAD Pro ($1,295.00 +
$99.00 for the mechanical add-on from home web site, $930.00 street, mechanical add-on $80.00 street
(which includes unbend and unfold), TurboCAD Pro Competitive Upgrade (for owners of many other
software packages including CorelDraw – check complete list of qualifying software at their web site)
($699.00 from home web site, $99.00 mechanical add-on from home web site, $600.00 street,
mechanical add-on $80.00 street). TurboCAD is also available for Macintosh:

http://www.turbocad.com/

TurboCAD 16 Pro screenshot.

ProgeCAD Professional – From ProgeSoft ($375.00 street). Very compatible with Autocad files,
very easy to learn for Autocad users, reads Autocad files all the way to Autocad version 2009, 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. ($795.00 street full license with one year

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support) includes sheet metal unfolding functions:

http://www.mv4t.com/

VariCAD 2010 screenshot.

SolidWorks – From Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. It costs $3,995.00 retail plus $1,295.00
retail for annual maintenance (not obligatory). 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.

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/

Some Commercial Illustration Software

Illustrator CS4 – From Adobe ($599.00 retail, $450 or less street). Best, industry standard but
pricey, but it still doesn't have a Create Boundary (CorelDraw) tool equivalent which is very god for
paper modeling, still, it is a very powerful Illustration software and it has Smart Guides which is a plus:

http://www.adobe.com/

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 Illustrator CS4 screenshot.

CorelDraw X4 – From Corel Corp. ($399.00 retail, around $200.00 or less in street) 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/

CorelDraw X4 screenshot.

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) but I wouldn't be surprised to find that a
future version of some of the illustration software that I will mention next comes with a similar tool
because they have improved markedly in the last few years and become quite a good alternative to the
higher priced ones. 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.

Xara Xtreme – From Xara Group Ltd. Fastest vector illustration software $89.00 from home web
site, Extreme Pro $249.00 from home web site too, good value, very fast and very capable (probably

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fastest vector illustration software in industry and in graphics in general):

http://www.xara.com/

Xara Xtreme 5 screenshot

Canvas – From ACD Systems International Inc. ($330.00 street). This software is sort of a dual
vector and bitmap editor in one and also quite capable:

http://www.acdsee.com/

Serif Draw Plus X3 – From Serif ($99.00 retail, $60.00 street). Very capable, good value:

http://www.serif.com/

Some Commercial Bitmap Type Image Or Photo Editing Software

Photoshop CS4 – From Adobe ($699.00 retail, $450.00 street). CS4 Extended ($999.00 retail,
$820.00 street). Best bitmap or photo editor in industry, standard and widely supported but costly,
Photoshop Elements ($99.00 retail, $65.00 street) very stripped down version but still pretty good.

http://www.adobe.com/

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 Photoshop CS4 Extended screenshot.

Corel Paintshop Pro X3 – New 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 X3 – From Serif ($79.00 retail, $60.00 street). Like the other software from Serif
a good value and very capable:

http://www.serif.com/

Some Free 2D CAD Software

DoubleCAD XT – 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.

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 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/index.shtmll

Solid Edge free 2D CAD screenshot.

FelixCAD – 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.

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.

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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
(the last one occurs when you print in vectors and you have bitmap textures anyway in your Pepakura
model) by using the Print Settings 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 Pepakura 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 Turbo CAD and I believe that the Pro
version since version number 15 of Turbo CAD has unfolding tools but I'm pretty sure that you need
the Mechanical Tools Add-On for that, 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. If I'm not mistaken the
platinum version of Turbo CAD already includes these mechanical tools but you should check and be
sure of this. If necessary drop them an e-mail and ask them about it.

Page 41
 SolidWorks Screenshot.

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 Paperkraft 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 Paperkraft 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

Page 42
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.

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

Page 43
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 X4 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 one 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. As for TurboCad it is now on version 16 and you just need version 15 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 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 CS4 and Illustrator CS4 you may be better off buying one of their
Creative Suites instead because they include a lot of additional programs (such as Flash Pro CS4 and
Dreamweaver CS4 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.

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.

Page 44
 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 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 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).

Page 45
 Blender version 2.49b screenshot with 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
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, 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

Page 46
these are two different processes and most 3D modeling applications come with a 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
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 demo 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 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 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 it preserves better the dashed lines
because Inkscape opens the dashed lines just fine and it saves them well in the PDF format. B-
Paperizer doesn't mark the fold lines as dashed lines but the SVG file that it generates opens just fine in
both CorelDraw X3 and CorelDraw X4. 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.

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

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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
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 script 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:

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 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:

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

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 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
in the directory where you installed Blender which in my case in Windows XP 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 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 and select
Update Menus and any new script that you put in the Blender script 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 script menu system
automatically. You can find it by clicking the Script 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 search function for
3ds_export.py, this file should be located in the folder we're looking for.

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The Blender Unfolding Scripts Controls

One advantage of the the Unfold script is that it already comes pre-installed with Blender so you
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 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

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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 find that baffling and I wonder if he had any trouble in attempting this but 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

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reduce the size of the created border so if you put it at 200% for example and you hit the 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 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.

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Chapter 3 - The Methodology Of 3D Paper Model Creation

P 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 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 as 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 54
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 π x R - where P is the perimeter, π 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 to and from a whole lot of different game model

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formats so 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

T 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,

Page 57
not all vector illustrations in this book are paper model patterns and keep in mind that I didn't build
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) 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.

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:

Vector illustration.

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 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
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

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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 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:

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:

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 Vector illustration.

And the next thing that we will do is to add the finishing touches:

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

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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
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 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

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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 Blender's
UVspheres:

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):

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 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:

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

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 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 2 subdivisions 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 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.

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 Hemisphere made with truncated cones
Cone 5

Cone 4
Cone 3
Cone 2
Cone 1

2 For a Whole Sphere

Vector illustration.

That above 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:

In the example above 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

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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
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).

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 Vector illustration.

“Beach ball” style whole sphere (6 sided, no gluing tabs).

Vector illustration.

“Beach ball” style whole sphere (8 sided, no gluing tabs).

Assembled whole sphere (6 sided on the left and 8 sided on the right).

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 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).

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

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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 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:

Observe the previous picture of Mimi White and Hello Kitty

in which the heads are basically made of cones.

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 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
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:

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 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:

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:

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 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

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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 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 have compound curves

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similar to the cones sphere but with 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 ¾ 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.

One detail here in that last description 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 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 if the orientation was vertical either and using a different orientation it's another
option but it can still work with the “beach ball” hemisphere with vertical orientation (with the “points”
pointing upward before gluing it) 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 would probably 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 B-
Paperizer 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:

From Angel D. Guzman 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

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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
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 perfect 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

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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:

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

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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:

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:

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 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:

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

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 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
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

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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 command
(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:

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?

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 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:

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

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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 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:

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:

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 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):

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:

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

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

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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?:

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

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 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:

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

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 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
happens as I explained before, if polygonal resolution is too high. Like in pre-rendered animations*
(animations that are non real-time 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 modeler can take advantage of that and create textures of much higher quality for paper models
if the modeler wishes so due to the fact that 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.

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 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
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

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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 real-
time 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

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.

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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.

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:

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 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
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.

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 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, activate edge select 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:

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:

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 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 those edges that will be used for
cutting or opening the model part:

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

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 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:

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 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 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 PDF exporter, the transparency
tool (for texture artwork), the arrange commands which allows 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), an icon that
allows me to switch quickly the Dynamic Guides on or off, alignment commands, 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 toolbar that I will show
you now it only appears under some conditions cause it's a context sensitive toolbar (meaning that it

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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 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 rectangular 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 cross 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 B-
Paperizer 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.

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 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.

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
Red line is a perfectly
Smooth red line is Round circle over
in the middle of the the original segmented
Black straight lines. 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

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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

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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 Office Draw
is not as precise as CorelDraw). 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

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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 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:

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 Vector illustration.

See how relatively smooth it is? This circle came from a cylinder that had 64 sides so it has 64
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 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

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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 a 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 decrease it if you feel that
some fold lines in particular should be included. This extra functionality is good news for people that
use illustration programs other than CorelDraw like Inkscape for example cause they lack the Create
Boundary function equivalent and even if they can use tools similar to Corel's Weld function

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(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
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:

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

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

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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 application 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. Take a look then to the next example:

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

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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:

As you can see the curve is still editable and I'm going to convert it to a mesh object 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:

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 That number circled is the one that concern us, 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.

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:

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 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, 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 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:

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 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:

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 curve 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

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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
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:

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 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
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

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 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 a 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. That is a flat pentagon seen at
an angle from the camera and now we extrude it backwards:

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:

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 What I did for the model above was to draw a curve path with straight lines forming a pentagon in
Blender and to extrude that shape along another curved object that did have real curves 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. 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 curve 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 used to guide the
extrusion and created the high poly resolution as the very smooth circle 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

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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 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.

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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:

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 vertical 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

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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, duplicated the curve for backup and converted it into a mesh that I spun 1
time with 10 divisions or sides. Look what else could have been done to this:

I used something in Blender called Proportional 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 Falloff on, selected which type of falloff effect (Blender has several) selected a vertex 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 the top vertex off-center and then I changed to the rotation mode 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 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's related to paper modeling. Other 3D software may

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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 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 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 this
this script gives us far less trouble than the Unfold script as a general rule. So we separate it in parts to
unfold it:

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 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:

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 together by

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selecting them all at the same time 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
other 3D 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

T 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 a sea ship 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 export to DXF 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 Autodesk DXF
option to save it then the pattern opens just fine in it. I couldn't open the file with either choice in
Inkscape or in Solid Edge 2D CAD but both opened just fine in DoubleCAD XT.

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 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:

http://www.google.com/language_tools

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 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 website 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

You can find the airplanes at the Paper Craft section in the Vehicles area.

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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 contour 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 Xtreme 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 in the right pane of that
window and you adjust this amount in 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 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 and Adobe Illustrator like Xara or Canvas or Serif Draw and others still don't offer this
feature after it has been offered by CorelDraw and Illustrator for so many years (CorelDraw has had it
since version 12, just before X3), particularly for Xara which has been a pioneer in many new features
that other illustration programs have adopted later on, despite this Xara has some good snapping
functions that will help a bit in the rearrangement. Something like Smart Guides is a function that

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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
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

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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 Middle Reinforcements B

Refuerzos Centrales A 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:
Middle Reinforcements A
Refuerzos Centrales A Middle Reinforcements B
Refuerzos Centrales B

Vector illustration.

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 The links for downloading this free display base are on pages 210-211.

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 in 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
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

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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 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

L 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:

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 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
+K) 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.

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 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 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 the 3D
cursor exactly between the two lower (or higher for the bottom half) vertexes and changed the pivot to
3D cursor instead of median point:

I selected then all the vertexes and extruded them without moving and then I scaled those new
vertexes while they were still selected to zero (toward the 3D cursor) and this is what I got:

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 After that I again selected all vertexes with Ctrl+A and applied the remove doubles function 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.

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

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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 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 Model Art :

This is a commercial F-15 model from ModelArt

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 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

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,
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

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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* (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
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, 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.

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.

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 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
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 sphere primitive with lot's of vertical rings and only

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about 16 horizontal divisions (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 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), then I
elongated it in the vertical axis and after that I rotated it 90 degrees to put it horizontally and I used the
Fall Off function afterward (the same one I used to twist the mushrooms 3D model) to shape the tips
(the front and back) better and of course 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:

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

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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:

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 cone and the propeller blades which 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 and then 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 Booleans* (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, so
basically I used the main fuselage shape as a “3D cookie cutter” for one fin which I replicated and
rotated 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 model cause it is also included with the the other 3D model files.

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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 Nurbs surfaces I have created the ship's hull whose compound curves 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

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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 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 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 shapes and
they don't have to be circular or symmetrical like in the spin method.

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 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) or by pressing the K key and selecting the first item
(Loop Cut) 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
that 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 to 0 [holding the
Ctrl key] but while restraining the scale to one axis only (in this case the vertical axis or Z axis) 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. 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 want to create is the upper deck
which is below the upper line of the hull (the one I've just straightened), a little below the upper ring of
vertexes of the ship's hull and for that I will use a Boolean function. The next thing I did was to create a
new object, a mesh cube, I reshaped it to be longer and wider than the hull and I place 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:

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 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 it indicates zero) and this is what I got:

After that I removed the duplicate vertexes by using the remove doubles 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:

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 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):

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:

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 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 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:

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 (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:

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

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:

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 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:

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 that you could do is that when you extrude the shape upward you can 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 hulls 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:

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

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

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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
paper modeling and to see how to apply it to different types of models and shapes to give you a head-
start, 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 or instancing. Blender 3D
modelers use now the mirror modifier and in many other 3D programs modelers use 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) 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

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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 sphere with low divisions cause
the subsurface divider 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 then I applied the subsurface
modifier (the mirror modifier should be applied first to prevent having to remove and reapply the
subsurface 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 (which can also be done in Blender but it's just easier to
do this with the mirror modifier in Blender or with something similar in other software if they offer it)
but the subsurface smoothing could be removed and the low poly box model could be modified to use it

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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”:

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:

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

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

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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 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:

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 B-
Paperizer 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:

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 Well in reality the script couldn't unfold everything because the shape was really broken here so it
is not really the script 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
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:

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 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 have
to really 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:

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:

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

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 B-
Paperizer 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:

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 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.

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:

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 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:

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 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:

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 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:

The next thing I did was to change to rotation mode and snap the pivot point of the hexagonal
shape to its leftmost vertex:

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 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:

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 pivot point 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 Xtreme 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:

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 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:

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 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:

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 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
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

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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 (Shift+Ctrl+G) the parts and then use Release of the
clipping mask (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:

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 measure 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 (in CorelDraw X3 that would be with the Shape
Tool but don't use that) because if you do it with a nodes edit tool it will loose its measure:

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 Then you move its pivot point to that same vertex that you first snapped to the horizontal line and
then rotate the measure 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:

Do you see? Now your measure line is perfectly horizontal. After your measure 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 measure line at one of the ends of the group, you will snap one of the measure line vertexes to the
last horizontal vertex of the group at either left or right of the group but the measure line has to be at
the outside of the selected snapping vertex, in this case at right:

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 After that you will adjust the whole group (while still grouped or while still selected as a whole
group) with the scale handles, you will snap the rightmost vertex of the whole group to the other vertex
of the measure line:

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:

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 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
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's 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 disappear, 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:

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 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:

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:

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

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doesn't have full artwork:

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 Blender) 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 UDons:

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 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 Model Art 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 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 UDons 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.

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:

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 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 have not been colored or painted like pro paper
model builders do because then 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 and if the edges are painted they can look even better. 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:

This model was created by user orcberto (from Alberto Modelos De Papel). You can download the
model at this location:

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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 up 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:

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/art/Master-Chief-PDF-Pages-1-10-64893599

Click where it says: PDF of the pieces and then on that page click on Download (to the left).

Of course because this model is of medium poly resolution it is of more complexity in design and

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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.

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

T 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. I couldn't
open it in Solid Edge 2D.

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
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

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the old fashion way before learning 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, cylinder, 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

T here has been a lot of very important open source software improvements lately. Blender.org has
just released version 2.5 Alpha 2 of their 3D program Blender but the full version, release 2.6,
which is due in about six months (at about mid 2010) is the one to look for next. From version 2.49b to
2.6 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 2.5
Alpha 1) 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 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 2.6 will have its own set of interface improvements that are all its own and unique 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 summer of 2010 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 2.5 Alpha 2 early
in this book).

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.

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 The following is directly quoted from the Blender 3D official web site:

“Work on the Blender 2.5 series will proceed alongside the Durian open movie project, along with
continued collaborative work from the worldwide developer community. While alpha 0 is the first
release for testing, we expect Blender 2.5 alpha 1 to be a completed implementation of the currently
existing UI (user interface) features, with at least all 2.49 functionality back, ready for documentation.

Betas 2, 3 and 4 will add additional UI features, alongside further tool development, leading up to
a fully stabilized and production ready Blender 2.6 release in mid 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. Version 3.1 of
the Open Office suit has been released recently 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, 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.

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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.

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 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) 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, ¼ 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 non-
common 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

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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

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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 necessary. If

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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 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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 8.5 inches 8.0 inches

11.0 inches

10.5 inches
Correct Incorrect

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

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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.

• 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

Size, 125 Dpi, Total resolution – 1032.5 x 1461.25 pixels exact, 1033 x 1461 pixels rounded
Size, 150 Dpi, Total resolution – 1239 x 1753.5 pixels exact, 1239 x 1754 pixels rounded
Size, 200 Dpi, Total resolution – 1652 x 2338 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded
Size, 300 Dpi, Total resolution – 2478 x 3507 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded

Page size – letter

Size, 125 Dpi, Total resolution – 1062.5 x 1375 pixels exact, 1063 x 1375 pixels rounded
Size, 150 Dpi, Total resolution – 1275 x 1650 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded
Size, 200 Dpi, Total resolution – 1700 x 2200 pixels exact, same amount of pixels rounded
Size, 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 300 Dpi, it would be something like
8.257 x 11.693 (<--- that's not a real number, just a simulation) inches or something similar. This is
obligatory to compensate for the rounding 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.

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 This small amount disappears as a natural margin of error and it won't cause any problems for the
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 modeler 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 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

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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
or emblems or the like but in most instances you will have to publish your artwork in a single layer.

• 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.

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 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 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.

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 Also:

http://www.mediafire.com/?
sharekey=bef98dda6119ec7a1bee9a6e9edd9c763226eac23d9aef9ab8eada0a1ae8665a

• 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 anti-
aliased right there in the design window of your software. Programs like CorelDraw, Illustrator, Xara,
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. The new Open Office version 3.1 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).

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 The letters S to the left are not anti-aliased and the ones to the right are. The upper ones are the
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 anti-
aliased artwork at the same time but for the purpose of paper modeling the ideal thing would be to anti-
alias 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.

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 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.

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 even if PS2 graphics can still look
pretty good without anti-aliasing even in a HDTV set 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.

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 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 Cláudio 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

D espite this book showing mostly a way to create paper models with Blender 3D and CorelDraw
X3 (or X4) 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 and unfold it with Ultimate Paperkraft 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. You could take such a hand drawn model and color the parts right there on paper or
you could scan them and color them 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. You could hand draw and
design 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
free 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. You could 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 Paperkraft 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
to experiment with these until you get a combination that works right, a lot of them work good enough.

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 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 Draw Plus or Xara 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 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.

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

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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 2.6 is complete so that
will help a lot, the new Blender 2.6 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 colors 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 .

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
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.

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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. 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 and X4 that creates an
outer shape automatically for all the shapes that are selected saving a lot of time.

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
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

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(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
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

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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 section
but you have to 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.

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 per
RGB channel and alpha channel for a total of 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 possible colors
+ 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
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.

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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
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 2.5 to 2.6 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.

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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 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
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.

Ring – 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

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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 walk or run 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
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).

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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
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 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 14 images were not created by me, they come from the Internet to be used as examples in this book and 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. They were not altered in any way and I acknowledge and thank their
respective creators in this list:

Technical Drawing book image – From Prentice Hall Publishing p. 16

Pepakura screenshot – From Tama Software p. 17
K3D screenshot – From www.k3d.org p. 30
VariCAD screenshot – From VariCAD p. 36
SolidWorks screenshot – From Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. p. 42
MilkShape Screenshot – From Chumbalum Soft p. 56
ModelArt F-15 paper model – From ModelArt p. 150
ModelArt P-51 paper model – From ModelArt p. 151
Los Angeles Class submarine – From Udon p. 191
Sonic And Knucles – From www.paperkraft.net p. 192
Lara Croft – From orcberto (Alberto Modelos de Papel) p. 192
Master Chief paper model – From Deviantart p. 193
Epson Workforce 1100 – From Epson p. 202
Bumblebee (Transformer) – From www.paperinside.com p. 214

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 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 275 of them) were created by me Angel David Guzmán of PixelOz Designs and are copyright of Angel David Guzmán and PixelOz
Designs. These images are copyright 2010 of PixelOz Designs and Angel David Guzmán 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 please respect that and keep it as it was intended, free.

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 39 is a free plan from http://www.cben.net/ and was
created by Architect Luis Zabala.

The house model on page 94 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 152 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 Guzmán 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 189 and 190 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 and the Bumblebee Transformer
photo are all used with permission from their respective authors. I could not contact Udon and orcberto from Alberto Modelos de Papel
cause I couldn't obtain their e-mails, there was no such information on Udon's site and 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 apologies to them for putting their photos here without asking them, after all
like I said, they will be just promotions of their models and as you can see here they are credited for their work, if they request it I will
withdraw and substitute those images 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 Čestmír Houška (Czestmyr) and is released under the
GNU/GPL license version 2.

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Publishing

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