newprotest.org: SKETCHUP + PEPAKURA + STEEL = GENIUS

SKETCHUP + PEPAKURA + STEEL = GENIUS

November 12, 2008
by: jovial_cynic
A while back, I was inspired to create a papercraft T4 bacteriophage in metal, just to see how it would turn out. The idea of taking a model from paper and applying it to sheet steel interested me, and it came out much better than expected. Slightly more difficult... but better, since the welding torch gives me some flexibility to make the models look a little more organic.

I picked up the papercraft model from a thread on a forum I visit, and in the thread, somebody linked to pepakura, a 3D editing program designed to let you import 3D-models and convert them into papercraft models.



After doing some research, I discovered that pepakura accepts models created in google's sketchup, as long as they're exported into the google-earth-4 format.


google sketchup


pepakura

Now that the weather is preventing me from working on outdoor projects, I can get back to work on my CNC machine, which I'll use primarily to cut out papercraft models into sheet metal.

This is fantastic.

COMMENTS for SKETCHUP + PEPAKURA + STEEL = GENIUS


elsocraft said:
hi !!
it is posible that you can send me or post here a tutorial of that !'? how to pass models from sketchup to pepakura ?!!step be step !

And is so interestin about papercraft models into sheet metal is like a metalcraft !!

February 05, 2009


jovial_cynic said:
eloscraft -

It's pretty straight forward - just make sure you have the latest google sketchup application, and export a model into google-earth-4 format. Then you just open up that file with pepakura.

With more complex models, you're going to find that pepakura is worthless for you, since there's not a practical way to turn complex models into paper. You'll have to find a way to simplify it, and I can't really help with that.

Good luck!

February 05, 2009


GameScanner said:
Hi there,

Great stuff. I experiment with pepakura & sketchup too. Do you know how one can export pepakura .OBJ file into sketchup .SKP file? I'd prefer freeware if possible.

Thanx!

March 01, 2009


jovial_cynic said:
GameScanner - I don't know how to do that in reverse; I haven't had any need to take an existing pepakura file and drag it into sketchup.
March 02, 2009


shane wilson said:
my name is shane wilson and im awsome







January 06, 2011


jovial_cynic said:
shane - hi! You might very well be awesome. What kind of awesome things do you do?
January 07, 2011


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