I'm slowly but surely getting the hang of Blender. It seems both powerful and flexible. As from the previous post, I have been using blender to create a scallop shell. Having created the 3D shape in blender I have used a tool called UV unwrapping to make a net of the shape. I then dropped the shapes into illustrator and tarted them up as below.

Here are the parts glued together. I glued it together inside out to hide the construction lines.

Here's the inside view.

Blender is an open source project which is available for a variety of operating systems. You can download your own version at the Blender Website here. If you are a member you can download both the pdf file of the shell and the blender file so you can experiment at home.

I'm planning to write a few tutorials on using blender to create paper models just as soon as I'm up and running myself. Which would you prefer, written tutorials or video tutorials?