When I bought my first all-in-one printer, Canon MP 287, it came with a software for printing paper art designs. The software from Canon used to download these 3D paper art designs from the internet. After downloading the designs from the internet, we could print them on paper, cut them out and then paste the different parts together to form great looking paper art objects.
While this can be done easily without any special software as there are tons of such 3D paper designs available on the internet, we can design our own paper art designs using a software called Papakura Designer. The software is able to design all kinds of 3D paper designs. The website for Pepakura Designer offers hundreds of ready-to-use designs which can be downloaded on the local computer and loaded in it.
Pepakura Designer is a paper art designer software and offers all the tools one would need for this purpose. But before you can use Pepakura Designer, you will need 3D data from 3DCG files. For creating 3DCG files for 3D models, we can use another free software called MetaSequoia which is not much different from 3DS Max from Autodesk.
After you have loaded 3DCG files in Pepakura Designer, it will unfold the model as if it is a paper. The overall result is that it will create 3D model for the paper art and then the cutout pattern for the paper sheets. We can then export these paper cut patterns to PDF files or directly print them on to a connected printer. We can also export the generated designs into a number of different image file formats.
Pepakura Designer is a great software to creating paper designs for the hobbyists. You can create your own unique designs and share them with the Pepakura Designer community which is spread all over the world.
You can download Pepakura Designer from https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/.