FoldUP!3D 1.5 review

So you're not a packaging designer, but sometimes you or your clients need a presentation box, point-of-sale display or some other cardboard construction to be printed flat and folded into three dimensions.

How do you lay it out? This Illustrator plug-in aims to provide the answer. It doesn't make it any easier to conceive or draw 2D 'nets', but it does let you fold them up on-screen, check that they work as expected, and generate 3D animations to show clients.

A single tool and a multi-pane palette are added to Illustrator. The basic principle is that you define 'cut lines' around your net and 'crease lines' showing where it's to be folded. These are normal Illustrator paths, although you're warned that creases must not contain any hint of a Bezier curve or they won't be accepted.

All you have to do to distinguish between cut lines, crease lines and artwork is to place them on different layers. You then use the Layer Mapping palette to assign a role to each layer. This means you can largely forget about FoldUP!3D and use Illustrator exactly as you would normally. The most important extra task is to tell each crease which way and how far to fold. You can also set the order in which the folds are made.

Once you've drawn your net, it's time to test it. Click the Fold button in the Folding palette to see your package constructed. If parts are missing or creases fail to fold, that's usually because creases aren't straight or cut lines don't meet up, and you can diagnose these glitches in the Verify Data palette, which visualises how your drawing is interpreted by the software.

Each of these functions has its own Refresh button, which you have to click to process the current paths before proceeding. This is a sensible way to avoid slowing the application down by auto-refreshing, but it's easy to forget and get into a tizz wondering why your latest changes haven't helped.

Working out the angle of each fold is easy for right-angled boxes, but for other shapes it can take some pretty heavy geometry. A killer feature for the next version would be the ability to click on a pair of paths and have a given crease adjust automatically to make them meet.

You can move, rotate and zoom the animated object by dragging it with the mouse, and you can fiddle with other aspects of the rendering in the Display Controls palette. The rendered animation can be exported to a QuickTime file. Sadly, you can't timeline camera movements - the object is seen from the same angle throughout, so it's unlikely that every fold will be visible as it happens. The only workaround is to export several movies using different position settings and splice them together in an external editing application.

Another significant limitation is that you can only work on a single construction at once. It's quite common to need two or more separate pieces to form a complete package. Although you can include more than one piece within the same Illustrator file, they don't interact.

You should also be aware that FoldUP!3D isn't intended to teach you how to construct nets. It won't, for example, calculate how long your flaps should be or how much to mitre them, or tell you whether or not they'll hold fast, and although it comes with a few example boxes, it doesn't have templates for standard features such as pop-up lids or crash locks. Nor does it extend to complex paper engineering: you can't stick one element to another and see if it pulls it into the required position when folded, and it's tricky to depict sliders or tuck-in flaps that insert parallel to the plane they intersect.