In this tutorial, you will learn what is Pepakura and how to use it. This is short 6 step, comprehensive introduction into a world of paper models;) How to: work with paper, what type of paper (how hard / heavy), and what tools you need to start; Updated: 2017/01/15.

Pepakura Designer 3 is a great and popular program for making real world papercraft models from 3D digital models. It folds out the model and adds glue tabs so you can print it on paper and make your model in real life. It’s an excellent alternative to 3D printing, especially for masks and helmets which you can reinforce with fibreglass and resin after they are glued.

But the program only runs in Windows. Can we do something about it?

In this article we cover using Wineskin Winery to run what would normally be a PC-only program successfully under Yosemite on a Mac! Rock, Scissors, Paper Papercraft is a great way to make prototypes of your 3D models, but the stumbling block for Mac users has always been that the program of choice for unwrapping your models as origami style papercraft models has always been PC-based. This is okay if you have access to a PC, but what if you don’t? Fortunately, help is at hand with the amazing Wineskin Winery software which will enable you to run simple PC software on the Intel processor on your Mac.

A Little Wine with That? First, get ahold of Wineskin Winery from this link. Wineskin Winery works on all Mac OS up to Yosemite. This is an acceptable limitation at the time of writing. If you are an early adopter of El Capitan, you are on your own. Download the latest version of the Pepakura Designer app here.

Bear in mind that this program is shareware; You can run it and print other people’s designs, but to do more than that and make PDFs of your own work and save/distribute them, you will have to pay the shareware fee to purchase the license code for the software for $38. You can use it for free with the above limitations as long as you like. Save the Pepakura EXE file somewhere where you can find it easily, like the desktop. Run the Wineskin Winery program and you will be presented with the panel to create a wrapper for your PC program. Add an engine by clicking on the plus button. The one used in this demo was WS9Wine1.7.44, but try a more recent one first in case it works better.

Click “Create New Blank Wrapper.” This brings up the Create a Wrapper panel. Name your wrapper. This will be the name of the “app” on your system, so give it an appropriate name. The busy sign will flash for a while. Depending on the amount of memory you have, this might take quite a few minutes, so it’s not broken; have a little patience. This goes for everything to do with Wineskin. It takes TIME.

Eventually you will get a notice that the wrapper “app” has been created. To view the icon, click the “View in Finder” button. If you click on the wrapper app too quickly, you will get a an alert saying the app can’t be opened. If this is the case, wait a few moments and try again. The first time you run the app, it will open the install panel.