How to unfold 3d paper project.

Hi every, at last a very promised tutorial about how to unfold paper plus making houses grow.
In a project I had to unfold a architecture paper project and then the project houses were supposed to star growing.
Like my following video :



Ok, lets start.

First create in the front view port a helix spline, it cant have height.

Then create a plane that is going to be the paper to unfold.Apply to it a turbosmooth modifier.
That will make your paper look smooth and not chunky.
Select the plane and apply a Path deform modifier . This is the modifier who is going to allow you to fold the paper with the shape of the helix. Press pick path and pick the helix.

In the path deform modifier select its gizmo's

Now we need to match your gizmo to the position and rotation of the helix, simply move and rotate the gizmo.

Now its just a question of animating the gizmo.
Select the path deform gizmo and create a key frame at frame 0 , move it ant create a key at frame 100.
Press play to test it.



Already looks great but to make it better lets thicker the paper.
Just use a shell modifier on the top of all the stack.

First part its done, now to make the houses grow.
Probably your houses are made of several different objects.
Start by grouping everyone by house.
In the example i used several objects and created a group of them.
Apply to the group a slice modifier. Select "remove top" and select "operand on quads".
Then select its gizmo's.

Like the paper model to make it more real lest add thickness using the shell modifier on the group.

To animating it growing just select the slice modifier gizmo's and create keys for it for example
in frame zero keep the gizmo at z=0 the at frame 20 rise it up until you see the full geometry.



Finally for completing a full set of animated groups.
Start by doing every step we did to every group you have. then just slice the created keyframes to different s times.
Example:
group 1 ( 0-20 frames)
group 2 ( 5-25 frames )
group 3 ( 10-30 frames)
and so on!




Hope you like it.

Any question feel free to ask!

By the way my site if finally finished .
Visit it also at http://www.square01.co.nr/