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 ?
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.