Unfolding polyhedra via tabu search

Abstract Folding a discrete geometry from a flat sheet of material is one way to construct a 3D object. A typical creation pipeline first designs the 3D object, unfolds it, prints and cuts the unfold pattern from a 2D material, and then refolds the object. Within this work we focus on the unfold part of this pipeline. Most current unfolding approaches segment the input, which has structural downsides for the refolded result. Therefore, we are aiming to unfold the input into a single-patched pattern. Our algorithm applies tabu search to the topic of unfolding. We show empirically that our algorithm is faster and more reliable than other methods unfolding into single-patched unfold patterns. Moreover, our algorithm can handle any sort of flat polygon as faces, while comparable methods are bound to triangles.