I ran across an interesting free e-book called the Fundamentals of Paper Engineering Design by Angel David Guzman of PixelOz Designs
A link can be found here: http://pixeloz.deviantart.com/
Going through the book around page 21 the author talks about Blender which is something I’ve played with.
Let’s there at least a couple of ways to unfold a 3d model….
There is a huge amount stuff in this book… Somehow I found this link that I thought would be a good place to get me started.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1627132
Uggg. Ok… So… Here’s the situation… I have 2.49b from synaptic. Apparently Blender is undergoing a major facelift with 2.5x
I played with Blender some months… years back and found the interphase to be less then welcoming… Unlike heekscad which seemed a lot friendlier but not as far developed.
Hm…. so what to do..
Most of the stuff that I’ve seen in the book has more to do with paper modeling and not pop-up. What I’m looking at is more like linkage-synthesis. There are so many options with so many deadends and my free time to allocate on this is very very limited…
Perhaps I’m looking at this problem from the wrong end… The pop-ups that I’m doing are not that complicated in design. I should just brute force this through. (You’d think there would be some simple parametric based open source pop-up paper models that could give you basic forms..)
I have access to a paper cutter. I need to get output to the papercutter. I wrote down the model number somewhere…. which I have misplaced it ahhhhhhh. @#%@
I did a quick search for paper cutting models.. Here is what I found quickly:
http://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/scrapbook-die-cut-machines-info.html None of these look like the one I need. Time to email my sibling..