Blender 3D Printing by Example

Marking and clearing seams

My grandmother sewed thousands of Raggedy Ann dolls in her lifetime. Each one of those dolls started out as flat pieces of fabric. They came together to make the 3D doll by carefully placed seams. In Blender, you can control how your faces are cut up and flattened by defining your own seams in your 3D model. To illustrate that, let's look at the process of cutting the hand into a top piece and a bottom piece. The steps are:

1. In Edit Mode, switch to Edge Select mode.
2. Hold down the Alt key and right-click on an edge to select an entire edge loop. In my case, I select the edge loop that divides the hand into a top and a bottom:

Using Alt + right-click to select an entire edge loop

3. In the Mesh menu at the bottom ...