What a fantastic idea. Developers who enable others to create art are artists in their own right!
Good artists enable others, great artists enable only Apple users.
Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#22I remember something like this was huge for rc planes 10-20 years ago as you could then make a plane out of thin bendable foam You'd make a 3D model from 3-views then use something like this to unfold it
You're thinking of the same app i used to use! I think it was a Japanese app called Papakura? It's what helped me learn 3d modeling back in the day
From another comment: https://pepakura.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura_designer/
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#23Beautiful landing page. I wonder if it uses the OCCT unfolding algorithms or something similar under the hood?
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#24Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#25Why is this not a web page?
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#26You can vibe code an app like this, relying on OBJ import (no editing apart from cutting/opening constraints), in possibly half a day.
If you doubt me, take, me up on it.
Sure, I have 35 years of experiences writing computer graphics code but I am certain I would just need to provide functional description input to Claude or Codex for this.
Zero architecture or deep 3D know-how.
The only challenge/interesting part is what happens with non-planar polygons (>3 vertices). I.e. deciding if they can be unrolled (approximated with a cylindrical or conical surface enough to 'work' when cut from paper that does not stretch).
You can alleviate this problem completely by always triangulating befor calculating any unfolding solution ofc (and get zero curved surfaces in the resulting paper model thusly).
The rest is rather trivial.
I'm not saying this isn't great, I just don't understand how you could ask people to pay for it, in early 2026.
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#27This is lovely and very slick, but you can get equivalent results for $0 with Blender and Export Paper Model.
That has the benefit of letting you create/edit/export the model in a single application instance in a single workflow that is easy with practice.
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#28You can vibe code an app like this, relying on OBJ import (no editing apart from cutting/opening constraints), in possibly half a day. If you doubt me, take, me up on it. Sure, I have 35 years of experiences writing computer graphics code but I am certain I would just need to provide functional description input to Claude or Codex for this. Zero architecture or deep 3D know-how. The only challenge/interesting part is…
No you should vibe code an app like this and prove yourself. Then see if people actually use it.
Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#29Re: Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
#30I like the clean design of the landing page. I downloaded it and started the app and it needs an OBJ file to even do anything, so I wasn't able to play with it at all. It would be cool if it included sample OBJ files to entice me to find my own later. Otherwise I feel like I just hit a wall immediately in the app will probably not try it again.
The way I tested was search Thingiverse for "angular" and download an STL, then convert it online to an OBJ on the first search result for "stl to obj" Specifically I tried this rook from this chess set. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5994219/files Sadly, some of the crenelations on top of it are just cubes with 2 sides missing that would be impossible to attach to the folded up rook. I imagine there is a ton of l…
Some items on thingsverse provide .obj files; like the king in this chess set...
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1078513/files
or this army tank...
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4618182/files
(n.b. under the main image viewer click the "files" tab to explore individual files/extensions)