I know this UV mapping and technically something different, but I wonder if it is possible to get such 2D cutting patterns out of a 3D mesh, without any texture. I was trying to work with OpenNest and TT Toolbox, but the results were pretty weird, and not similar like in the example image, they also couldn’t be used as cutting patterns.
There’s Ivy, but it isn’t exactly as elegant as a nice, manually laid out UV-set or a procedural one done with some nice, dedicated software (cf. headus).
How does the geometry look like that you want to unroll? If it isn’t too complex, a custom Grasshopper workflow could be feasible.
Yeah, generally I don’t like how Ivy unrolls complex meshes that much either.
Clean and rather simple meshes are easier to gain control over though.
That said, the Stanford bunny is a bad example. It’s a high poly, triangulated mesh, which would be a nightmare to UV-unwrap by hand and even with specialised pragrams. It would have to be remeshed manually or algorithmically to get a cleaner, less tessellated quad mesh first.
It’s popular with CG artists that want to quickly unwrap UVs. 3D Coat and ZBrush also have great, professional UV-unwrapping tools.
You might want to look into something like Pepakura, too. It’s a Japanese program for manually unwrapping meshes for paper craft. It’s rather straightforward to handle. I used it back in my university days with a couple of projects to be able to translate some blobby, experimental forms into physical models for laser cutting.
In general, the cleaner and simpler the mesh, the easier it is to unroll UV- or otherwise.
Highly subdivided models are a nightmare to unwrap.
