Paper models and Tenkai

Neat… I never heard of this till you mentioned it.

Downloaded the trial version… looking forward to testing it out.

Hi all,

It occured to me that all these scenery items built for MS Train sim could be scaled and exported to Tenkai as paper models and used in andquot;realandquot; model railways.

I tried the unregistered version, exporting OBJ files, but it seemed to have some difficulty handling multiple texture files – and it did tend to split the objects unncessarily into a lot of pieces.
Tenkai seems to have been sold now to Pepakura – which I’m attempting to test now.

Does anyone else know of other tools for exporting paper models?

… or is this a new plugin I should be writing <!– s;) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!– s;) –>
(I have quite a bit of experience in printing graphics from Visual Basic)

I just gave Pepakura a whirl.

Omigosh.

It’s Tenkai on steroids…literally. It’s written by the same guy who did Tenkai (Jun Mitani), so the interface and all that was extremely intuitive and familiar to me. Jun Mitani also seems to be in charge of the company.

It has every feature I asked him for while I was using Tenkai, and a lot I didn’t even ask for but needed desperately. Like splitting and rotating parts.

I am soooo totally buying it…all those new features basically just eliminated 75% of the busywork I had to go through before.

You might want to avoid OBJ files for complex models…imported OBJ files can only have one texture, while the other supported formats support multiple materials and in some cases multiple groups.

-Mel

I think the english version is quite recent…

I’m starting to resign myself to writing a plugin – I want a bit more control over the export e.g. group or object selection.

Should be fun <!– s;) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!– s;) –>

I wasn’t aware Pepakura had an English version available…is that the case?

Anyway, I own the full version of Tenkai.

It’s a great app for making paper models, but it’s a bit tricky to master. A lot of times you can’t just unfold a whole model…it’s better to split the model up into logical components and then unfold each of those separately.

I don’t bother with unfolding textured models…I usually just export the line art to EMF or use a fake PostScript printer to get pure PS output which I then open in Paint Shop Pro at 300dpi with anti-aliasing off. Then I andquot;textureandquot; the paper model there.

My plane in the Aircraft Gallery was done like that. In fact, it’s wearing the paper model as the texture. If you look real close at the lower right corner inside the left air intake, you can actually see the fold lines.

If you’re thinking about doing a plugin, I hope you already know how to unwrap and project logically related faces to an arbitrary plane, hehheh…it’s a lot like writing an UV mapper.

-Mel