About
Pepakura Designer is a decent unfolding tool, but I consider the vector format exports to be quite limited and not really suitable for further editing. For example:
- every exported line is a separate object - for example dashed lines are broken into multiple separate paths, so you get a lot of unnecessary objects
- therefore you can't simply click a part and recolor it, because its dozens of separate lines
- the textures are not exported at all. If your model has textures, you're out of luck.
- vector exports are not available in Pepakura Viewer. Which makes things difficult if you want to customize some model not made by you.
In addition, Pepakura is only available on Windows.
Therefore I made PDO tools. It a small program thad reads data from Pepakura PDO format and exports the parts as SVG files (which are easily editable by a vector editor like Inkscape) in a more suitable form:
- part outlines are used to create a single filled object for each part
- the unfolded triangles and quads from the 3D objects are exported as well. You can rearrange them to modify how the parts were unfolded
- textures (and solid fills) are exported as clipped bitmaps. Each part has its own bitmap, so you can redraw any individual part as you want.
It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Due to the PDO format not being public there's a lot of guesswork involved though, which leads to some issues and disadvantages:
- the tab shape is wrong in some cases
- the line types don't always match
- edge numbers are not exported yet
Download
- Windows 64bit
- Windows 32bit
- Linux 64bit (depends on GTK libraries and libhpdf), version 0.7
- MacOS (10.6 and higher, no PDF export), version 0.8
Support
If you want to support my work, consider making a small donation. Thank you!
Todo
- hide fold lines when there's just a small angle between faces
- replace textures for exporting
- export edge numbers
- model viewer
Development
Source is now available on GitHub.
Changelog
v0.10 (4.8.2022)
- improved support for Pepakura version 4 and higher
- option to merge tabs with outlines
- updated compression library (faster loading and exports)
- github source release
v0.9 (25.1.2018)
- allow exporting each page to separate file
- SVG: set proper page size
- allow changing the text encoding. Some files use wrong encoding, so weird characters may appear in non-english texts, even in Pepakura viewer. This is a limitation (or bug?) in Pepakura itself
v0.8 (24.7.2016)
- support new Pepakura version 4
- improved texture quality
- fixed reading of files without unfolded data
v0.7 (3.1.2016)
- tab clipping - if any tab of a part overlaps its outline, it is downsized so no overlap remains
- OBJ: export groups
- PDF: respect pdo page orientation
- fixed outline shape for some parts
- faster PDO loading if PDO contains a lot of textures
- sligtly faster SVG export
v0.6 (24.7.2015)
- extended fold line option: fold line is not drawn over the part's texture, but extends from the part's edges
- PDF: use dashed line for valley folds and solid line for mountain folds
- improved fold line handling: don't export hidden fold lines, hide almost flat lines
- much faster PDO loading
- improved SVG and PDF export speed and texture precision
- improved 'Save as...' file naming/filters
- warn if libhpdf cannot be found
- fixed minor pixel-sized artifacts in textures with white areas
- fixed non-default page margins in PDF export
- fixed rare texture bug
v0.5 (10.1.2015)
- new PDF export option (uses Haru/libhpdf)
- change line and image attributes in SVG files for better compatibility with new versions of Inkscape
- fixed issue with some pdo files that had imported images
v0.4 (7.1.2015)
- DPI for each part is set individually according to the part's size and its texture resolution
- improved SVG export speed
- export fold lines. Hiding by angle is not yet supported
- fixed crash when unfolded face has more than 4 vertices
- fixed rare issue with broken textures in exported SVG files
v0.3 (17.11.2014)
- SVG: improved texture precision
- SVG: much faster export, multiple CPU cores utilization
- change DPI scale, set 125 as default
v0.2 (27.10.2014)
- tab export
- improved reading of material color
v0.1 (10.8.2014)
- SVG: improved text export - better positioning, multiline text
- SVG: fixed opening of SVG files with japanese characters in Inkscape
- SVG: parts (junk) that are positioned out of pattern pages (left/top only) are not exported anymore
- improved texture mapping precision
- fixed issues with extremely small textures
- slightly faster SVG export
r164
Many SVG export improvements.
- SVG: improved part outlining
- SVG: added smooth texture filtering
- much faster SVG export
- fixed color of materials with no texture
- OBJ: normalize to unit size = 2
r114
- texture wrapping (repeated texture) support
- material color support (for untextured faces)
- SVG: fix unescaped 'less than'/'greater than' characters in text export
r104
- SVG: texture export. No texture filtering currently. Textures are stored in separate layer group.
- SVG: part outline export. Outlines are stored in separate layer group.
- SVG: initial Text export support. Multiline texts and font sizes aren't handled properly
- SVG: image export.
- new icon ;)
r57
- linux builds for QT and GTK frameworks
- Wavefront OBJ export