This looks adorafun. Indie developer Pixle is releasing a tool for the iPad to make designing your own papercraft figures super easy.
The app, called Foldify, uses a mixture of pre-build patterns and finger painting tools to allow you to create designs while previewing them in 3-D on the fly. Once you're done, print them out on card stock, cut and fold. As easy as that, more weird things for your desk.
The motivation for the app came from a lack of features in existing tools. "The problem with papercraft is that it requires quite a lot of work to create something that looks nice," says Foldify's Krzysztof Zabłocki, who runs the project along with Mariusz Ostrowski and Renata Ostrowska. "Even using your Mac you can't get a real-time preview of the folded figure, which means that creating something requires a lot of hit and miss."
From the video preview, it appears they were able to overcome the preview obstacle, as well as solving the problem of using our fat fingers as a clumsy drawing tool. Instead of changing the size of the brush, they change the size of the canvas. Need a more precise line? Zoom in. Want to slather an area with color? Zoom back out.
This isn't the first papercraft app out there. For example, on a laptop or desktop, plugins like Unfold and Flattery allow Sketchup users to unfold their designs, enabling all kinds of complicated shapes to come to life in paper. And Pepakura has become one of the go-to tools for small paper projects and oversized cosplay armor alike, allowing incredible life-size characters to be made from complex folded geometries. But all that extra power comes with the cost of being harder to use.
With its palette of pre-built forms and an in-app surface painting interface, Foldify looks to be a papercraft designer for the rest of us. (How crazy is it that our 3-D tablet tools have advanced to the point that Sketchup has become the complicated option? So crazy.)
"What we really wanted to do is create an app that would be enjoyed by anyone with just a little bit of creativity," says Zabłocki. "Even if you can't draw anything, you can use shapes that we added to the app, and there are tons of them to make each figure unique and fun."
Foldify is expected to launch on December 13th.
(Hat tip Daring Fireball)
