Unfolder script/addon for animating unfolding of mesh

hello there,

Back in the pre-Blender-2.5 days I wrote a script for unfolding meshes which also animated the unfolding/folding of meshes (it used to be bundled with Blender as mesh_unfold.py) – what’s the modern day equivalent of this ? A Blender script/addon that unfolds a mesh into a single net (not multiple pieces) and provides a way to animate that net folding back into the mesh. Please don’t confuse unfolding with UV-unwrapping - I want an unfolder. I’m guessing the way it would be done these days would be by automatically creating an armature with keyframes to animate the mesh. Is there such a script/addon ?

-Celeriac

Hi. Try https://github.com/the3dadvantage/BlenderSurfaceFollow/raw/master/UVShape.py

Shape key based.

TexTools has a tool to create a UV mesh that blends between mesh topology and UV layout. Haven’t tried Lobo’s link but i presume its similar, TexTools version also uses shape keys.

The discussion thread can be found here

thanks, but this is a UV unwrapper which is not what I asked for

@liero, your blender file has a nice animation