Every physical thing you can build from a 3D file comes down to one number: how many triangles. Twelve is a cube you can fold before your coffee cools. A few hundred is a life-size cardboard figure. Fifty thousand is a job only a machine can do. The four studios here — trace a photo into a solid, sculpt it point by point, then unfold it into numbered cut sheets or slice it into stackable ribs — all run free in your browser, and all stay inside the numbers a pair of hands can actually build.

The famous Stanford bunny, redrawn at craft scale. It ships inside the unfolder studio as the built-in starter model - load it and unfold it with one click.

The tools that used to exist

There was a golden moment when this was all free. Autodesk shipped 123D Make in 2011 — feed it a model, and it produced stacked slices with dowel holes, interlocking ribs, or folded panels, complete with numbered parts and assembly diagrams. In 2017 it became Slicer for Fusion 360; in 2020 Autodesk discontinued it outright, posting a final unsupported download and walking away. The paid survivors — Pepakura Designer on Windows, Unfolder on Mac — lock exporting behind a licence.

None of the underlying geometry ever needed a licence or an operating system. Unfolding is hinge-by-hinge trigonometry; slicing is a plane cutting triangles. A browser tab does both — so this workshop rebuilt them. The slicer brings back 123D Make’s stacked and interlocked modes; the unfolder does what Pepakura charges for. Every mode stays free, and the roadmap card above shows what gets rebuilt next.

• Autodesk support — Slicer for Fusion 360 deprecation notice and final 2020 release
• Autodesk Community — 123D Make (2011) to Slicer for Fusion 360 (2017) lineage
• Tamasoft — Pepakura Designer licensing (save/export disabled unregistered)
• Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory — the Stanford bunny, laser-scanned 1994, 69,451 triangles in the reconstructed mesh
• STL format specification — 50 bytes per triangle; dental crown scans at 20,000–50,000 triangles ≈ 1 MB