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When the texturing is complete, I then open the model in Pepakura Designer for unfolding. At this point, the objective is to generate the best unfolded development possible for a buildable paper model. This is a job for the human eye and the human brain, not the automatic algorithms used by Pepakura Designer. In fact, the algorithms practically never get it right for anything except the simplest of shapes, and the most common newbie mistakes is to accept the automatic unfolding rather than hand optimizing it for build ease. I also label the parts at this step.

There's a very specific art to doing this. Glue tabs must be moved to the correct edges, seams must be artfully located out of sight, and each part needs to be re-arranged so that it folds up in a certain way. The little secret to the process is that everything, and I mean everything, can be developed as one of the following primitives: a cone, a cylinder, or a double sided plane. A pyramid is a four-sided cone, a box is a 4-sided cylinder, and an Apollo capsule is just a truncated cone. Even a sphere is just a series of truncated cones, unless you develop it as a geodesic sphere. It sounds absurd, but I promise you it's the truth.

Once I'm satisfied with how the unfolding looks, and if the test build worked out well, I then do the layout preparation in Photoshop. Generally, this involves cropping the page to 7.5x10 inches, then adding the frame, copyright notice, logo, and the name of the model. 7.5x10 inches was chosen because it fits nicely on both ISO A4 and US Letter sized paper, which are the two sizes that cardstock is most readily available in, and the sizes that practically every desktop printer can handle.

Sometimes I need to add frames around fold-over parts, fix weird glue tabs, or add other graphic elements to the page. Those things are done in this step, and the changes are saved to a separate document so I can re-apply them to other variations easily, following my closely held principle of "where possible, do the hard stuff only once, then reuse it."

The PDF files are also generated at this step, straight out of Photoshop. Before this, I was using OpenOffice.org to manually place the images and export them to PDF files.

The part I hated the most over the years is photographing the models. Have you ever had a certain thing that, no matter how hard you try, you simply suck at it? For me, that's photography. My photos have this clinical quality to them, and one amusing anecdote passed on to me a year or two ago was that my photos are like pictures of vaginas in a gynecology textbook, while my favorite competitor Denny Unger is the guy who takes glamorous nude photos. As much as it chafes my ego, I have to agree.

Self-deprecation aside, photography is a job that needs to be done, and I use a Fuji FinePix 205 digital camera. For lighting, I started out with the simple expedient of using Reveal bulbs in every socket in the house, but I've moved on to using fluorescent photo lamps lately. The best images are then cropped, and color-adjusted if necessary, for use on the website.

Over the years, the lighting and color balance in my shots have improved steadily, and maybe one day I'll get the hang of composition and the other curly frou-frou stuff.

At first, I did the instructions for all my models as a series of photographs with some attached text. This was useful, but very limiting in many ways. Then one day I remembered playing with Lego blocks a lot as a kid, and they had really cool illustrated step-by-step instructions showing the pieces in an orthographic projection. I wanted a similar sort of feel, and I tried it in a few sets during the 2003-2004 years. It was nicely received, but very time-consuming to do without the right tools for it, and I had to switch my screen resolution from 800x600 up to 1280x1024 every time I wanted to take print resolution screenshots. That, to put it mildly, was annoying on a 15-inch monitor.

I tried again in 2006 with the XM709 Hercules, using POV-Ray, but it was still a time-consuming task and there still wasn't a way to add wireframe overlays to simulate fold lines, which just seemed wrong not to have in paper model instructions. Then, later that year, I bought Carrara 5, which had all the functionality I needed to do rendered instructions quickly, efficiently, and with fold lines on the model to boot. Starting with the Invader Attack Craft, I've been rendering the instruction sequences in Carrara 5. In this step, I import the model and arrange the parts.

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