Extensions
  • Home
  • Add-ons
  • Themes
  • Approval Queue
  • About
  • Upload Extension
  • Sign in
  • BLENDER.ORG

    • Download

      Get the latest Blender, older versions, or experimental builds.

    • What's New

      Stay up-to-date with the new features in the latest Blender releases.

    LEARNING & RESOURCES

    • Blender Studio

      Access production assets and knowledge from the open movies.

    • Manual

      Documentation on the usage and features in Blender.

    DEVELOPMENT

    • Developers Blog

      Latest development updates, by Blender developers.

    • Documentation

      Guidelines, release notes and development docs.

    • Benchmark

      A platform to collect and share results of the Blender Benchmark.

    • Blender Conference

      The yearly event that brings the community together.

    DONATE

    • Development Fund

      Support core development with a monthly contribution.

    • One-time Donations

      Perform a single donation with more payment options available.

All Add-ons

Add-on PolyZamboni
PolyZamboni

Papercraft in Blender.
Add-on by Anton-Florey
About What's New Permissions Reviews Version History
Export to PDF or SVG! Adjust the final page layout! Cut your mesh with interactive feedback! Poweful editing tools! Textures and Instructions on separate pages for two-sided printing! Get creative!

Turn your low-poly creations into papercraft instructions with this Blender addon.

You no longer need any additional software or good faith in some automatic unfolding algorithm. PolyZamboni provides you with all tools necessary to create high quality paper models!

version downloads license stars

coffee

Usage

With the addon enabled, select any mesh object and navigate to the PolyZamboni panel in the viewport sidebar (toggle with 'N') and click on the Unfold this mesh button. This starts the unfolding process of the selected mesh with no initial cuts.
Not all meshes can be processed by PolyZamboni. The following things prevent this addon from working for your mesh:

  1. Non-manifold vertices or edges
  2. Faces that touch at more than one edge
  3. Faces that can not be triangulated via PolyZambonis custom triangulation angorithm
  4. Faces that are highly non-planar

You will get a warning whenever one of these fail-cases occur and the option to select all faces that need to be fixed.

Interactive paper model editing

To transform your 3D model into printable mesh pieces that can be glued together to create an awesome paper model, you have to define where the mesh should be cut open and where to place flaps for glueing. You can edit cuts and glue flaps by entering Edit Mode. Here, you have access to plenty of powerful tools:

  • Separate Materials adds cuts between all faces that have different materials assigned to them.
  • Auto Unfold automatically adds cuts until the entire mesh can be unfolded. The algorithm tries to create loops of connected faces. You can choose whether these loops should wrap around the X, Y or Z axis. You can also give a maximum number of connected faces.
  • Remove Auto Cuts removes all automatically added cuts. In case you are not happy with the results of the previously listed operation.
  • Recompute Flaps places glue flaps at all cut edges. The greedy algorithm tries to avoid overlaps of the printed pieces. There is also a toggle next to the button that lets you decide whether flaps should alternate along patch boundaries.
  • Alt+C opens the manual cuts pie menu. Here you can cut, clear or glue all selected edges. Glued edges can not be cut by the Auto Unfold operator and have no other purpose. You can also select multiple faces and mark them as one connected region via the Define Region operator. This automatically cuts all edges between selected and non-selected faces.
  • Alt+X opens the glue flaps pie menu. Here you can add, remove and flip the glue flaps attached to all selected edges.

Intuitive feedback

PolyZamboni renders feedback on top of your models. Dotted lines on top of mesh edges indicate one of the following:

  • Red edges: Manually added cuts
  • Green edges: Manually glued edges (can't be automatically cut)
  • Blue edges: Atomatically added cuts

All connected face regions, separated by cut edges, are visualized via colored patches on top of mesh faces. These regions colored based on their quality:

  • Red regions: These regions can not be unfolded onto a piece of paper. If any of these regions exist, no paper model can be created.
  • Orange regions: Although all faces can be unfolded, they would overlap on the plane. This makes the resulting instructions fairly unusable in practice.
  • Yellow regions: Almost perfect regions. Only the flaps used to glue pieces together overlap on the final print.
  • Green regions: These regions can be unfolded without any overlaps. If all regions are green, you are usually good to go!

Glue flaps are also visualized on top of faces at the position they will have in the papercraft version of your mesh. If any flap overlaps with something in the instruction, it will be colored red.

Edit the page layout

Before exporting the instructions for your model, PolyZamboni allows you to edit the final page layout. For this go to the UV or Image-Editor and open the sidebar. After clicking on Create print review and setting some layout options, a preview of all pages and papermodel pieces should appear on your screen. You can then edit the layout by clicking on Edit page layout. Here you can do the following things:

  • Select pieces by left-clicking on them.
  • Move a selected piece by pressing g. Behaves similar to Blender's move operator.
  • Rotate a selected piece by pressing r. Behaves similar to Blender's rotate operator.
  • Change the build step number of a selected piece by pressing f.

Exporting instruction sheets

Once you are satisfied with your edits, you can export the paper model instruction. Go to File->Export->Polyzamboni Export PDF/SVG or just click in the respective buttons in the side panel. PolyZamboni lets you fully customize the instructions appearance. Here is a list of export options:

  • Size of the final model. You can either specify a target model height or directly define the model scale.
  • Paper size, page margin and distance between mesh pieces.
  • Font sizes and colors.
  • Edge appearance (width, color, linestyle, and more...)
  • Texturing of mesh faces (nothing, solid color or texture image)

Tip: Model size and margins are measured in the units of the current blender scene. I recommend to set the scenes length unit to something like cm, unless you are planning to create huge models. Change this setting at Scene Properties->Units.

And now: Get creative!

I am thrilled to see what you can create with this addon. Share your cool papercraft creations with me and the world!


What's New

1.1.4 May 17th, 2025

New glue flap features

Whats new:

  • Added smart glue flap trimming
  • Moved the glue flap recomutation operator to the glue flap menu
  • You can now manually add and remove individual glue flaps

Bugfixes / Improvements:

  • Fixed a bug where removing cut edges at mesh boundaries made glue flap data inconsistent
  • Errors while editing a paper model now get passed through and printed to the console
  • Edge numbers will not get printed at boundary edges
  • Relaxed intersection tests to avoid more false positives

See all versions


Permissions

This extension requests the following permission:

  • Files

    Export PDF/SVG to disk

Developer
Anton-Florey
Rating
(2)
Version
1.1.4
Updated
1 w
Published
Feb. 22nd, 2025
Downloads
2292
Compatibility
Blender 4.2  and newer
Supported Platforms
  • macOS Apple Silicon, Intel
  • Windows
  • Linux
Website
github.com/AntonFlorey/PolyZamboni
Report Issues
github.com/AntonFlorey/PolyZamboni
License
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
3D View Import-Export
Windows – 13.6 MB
...or download and Install from Disk
macOS - Intel – 14.4 MB
...or download and Install from Disk
macOS - Apple Silicon – 14.1 MB
...or download and Install from Disk
Linux – 17.3 MB
...or download and Install from Disk
  • Windows 13.6 MB
  • macOS Intel 14.4 MB
  • macOS Apple Silicon 14.1 MB
  • Linux 17.3 MB

Reviews

See all
  • Anji
  • v1.0.1
  • 1 mo

Hello! I've been using Export Paper Model for pepakura blueprints. Your add-on has been filling out a lot of what I wished was available to me while working with the latter. I do however find it difficult to navigate the Zamboni interface, and would prefer seeing the Edges while defining regions, which has also been a problem when I can't (or don't know how to) hotkey the command. Your work looks very promising for low-poly and small projs, but after working with it, there's room to fill to cater larger meshes such as one I'm working on.

One key difference from Export Paper Model was the lack of notice about 'twisted polygons': faces that would curve if it were on paper. I haven't ever printed my works yet but that might be a concern, yes?

Everything aside, your work is great! High hopes for this passion project of yours

  • Anton-Florey replied
  • 1 mo

Hi! Thanks for the review :)

The mesh edge visibility is an issue. I do not know how to render lines infront of mesh faces but behind edges (like seams are rendered by Blender). My solution is to draw dotted lines so you can still see the mesh edge behind it. You can adjust the dotted line length to your liking in the PolyZamboni Render Settings Panel. The colored regions can also be hidden there, in case they annoy you.

I assume 'twisted polygons' are faces that are not planar. The Addon warns you if very twisted faces are present when starting the unfolding process. I chose a somewhat arbitrary threshhold that might be a bit to lax at the moment. Maybe an operator that gives you some kind of planarity score would be a nice feature to add here.

Thanks again for the feedback! I plan on making a tutorial video soon. Maybe it will clarify some things further. If you have any suggestions on how to improve this addon (also for larger projects) im happy to hear from you :)

  • Archil
  • v1.0.1
  • 1 mo

Hi, having bit of a trouble here, would you be able to provide a video tutorial any time soon? please? also, thank you!

  • Anton-Florey replied
  • 1 mo

Hi! I plan to make a tutorial video soon to make this addon more accessible :)

Is there anything specific you are having trouble with? Maybe I can clarify some things here already.

And thank you for the review, it means a lot to me!

4.5

2 reviews
5
4
3
2
1
Rate this Add-on
  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
Download
  • Latest Blender
  • Blender LTS
  • Blender Benchmark
  • Previous Versions
  • Experimental Builds
  • Source Code
  • Release Notes
  • Requirements
Organization
  • People
  • Jobs
About
  • Blender Foundation
  • Blender Institute
  • Blender Studio
  • License
  • Logo & Trademark
  • Credits
  • Privacy Policy
Articles
  • News
  • Press Releases
  • User Stories
Get Involved
  • Dashboard
  • Development
  • Documentation
  • Education
Blender Studio
  • Films
  • Training
Support
  • Manual
  • Community
  • FAQ
Developers
  • Get Started
  • Projects
  • Docs
  • Blog
  • Forum
  • YouTube
  • Python API
Blender Conference
Follow Blender
Support Blender
  • Donate
  • One-time Donation
Artistic freedom starts with Blender The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite