Fabricating Ideas

I’m working on a demo for my moldmaking class and I thought I’d post a couple images here. I’m playing around with an application called Pepakura designer – it’s an “unfolding” kind of origami design application. It’s Shareware so you can download a fully functional (except for the saving) trial for free, and then buy a password for only $38.

It handles OBJ files very well. I made the form for this object in “realflow” (a fluid modelling for cgi application I’ve been playing with) and then brought that into Rhino to reduce the number of surface polygons. I exported an OBJ from Rhino, imported this into Pepakura, printed it out on my epson desktop printer, cut it out w/ an X-acto knife and folded it up.

One really interesting thing about Pepakura (as opposed to some other unfolding apps I’ve used like TouchCAD or Lamina) is it will still unfold the OBJ even if there are naked edges or internal geometry. I think this is going to be a really nice teaching tool for teaching 3d CAD craft because when you actually print the unfolded template out onto paper and then physically fold it up you really understand what it means to have a “naked edge” or “shared faces”! The other thing I really like about unfolding is it’s a relatively easy way to get a physical form out of a CAD application without CNC technology (although it also translates to a variety of CNC tools – laser cutter, water jet cutter, plasma cutter – really easily.