Two Outlines In, One 3D Model Out
The modern answer to "turn my picture into a 3D model" is an AI service: upload your photo to someone's cloud, wait, and hope. The older answer is better for real building: a front silhouette sets the width, a side silhouette sets the depth, and lofting the two through 40 cross-sections gives a watertight solid — deterministic, private, in your browser, in about a second. It exports as STL, or jumps straight into the unfolder studio to become a cut-and-fold pattern.
Lofting: the oldest trick in 3D
Long before CAD, boat builders drew a hull as a set of stations — cross-sections at intervals along the keel — and "lofted" full-size curves through them on the workshop floor. Sculptors did the same with profile templates. This tool is that method, automated: it reads your front outline row by row for width, your side outline for depth, draws an eight-sided section at each of 40 heights, and skins the stack into a single closed surface.
Because it is geometry rather than guesswork, the result is watertight and predictable — the same two images always produce the same solid, ready for printing or unfolding. The trade-off is honesty about what two views can know: detail that hides from both the front and the side (a hollow, an undercut, a gap between an arm and a body) cannot be reconstructed. Bold, simple silhouettes — bottles, busts, chess pieces, animals in profile — loft beautifully.
Getting a clean loft
Feed it filled shapes, not line drawings. The threshold slider decides what counts as solid: drag it until the preview shows your subject as clean white on black. A photo works when the subject contrasts hard with the background — a person against a bright wall, a dark bottle on a windowsill. If your subject is lighter than its background, tap "Subject is light".
The side image is optional but transformative. Without it, depth is a fixed fraction of width — fine for vases and columns. With it, the model narrows and swells exactly where your profile does; a face silhouette gains its nose. Match the two images roughly in height and the tool aligns their levels automatically.
Or skip images entirely and loft your initials. A solid whose front silhouette is one letter and whose side silhouette is another is a small legend of design - the cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach carved exactly such blocks so that light through them cast the book's three initials on the walls. Type any two letters above and the maker builds yours in a second in Intersect mode - the subtractive construction that keeps each letter exact from its own face, counters and all - or switch to Loft for a smooth, unfoldable rounding of the same idea. Print it, slice it, or fold the loft version into a desk-sized cardboard monogram.
Then make it real. The result lands at around 600 triangles — inside the unfolder studio's hand-buildable cap — so "Send to the unfolder studio" takes your lofted solid directly to cut sheets, armature ribs, or leadlight patterns without touching a file.
- Traditional lofting practice — full-size fairing of hull stations in boatbuilding, the origin of the CAD term "loft"
- STL format specification — triangle-mesh solids and watertightness (V−E+F=2 for a closed surface)
- Shape-from-silhouette literature — the visual-hull limit: geometry invisible in every silhouette cannot be reconstructed