Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial that will show me how to create an asteroid in Sketch Up?

It should be that difficult with flattery to reverse engineer its unfold programming.

Basically when the unfold operation is conducted the areas where the edges of the faces were located before being unfolded would leave behind a a line marking the farthest edge of the faces distance.

The model is then grouped as an object where one of the farther edge lines is selected along with the corresponding edge of the grouped unfolded model.

The fold icon is clicked and the object folds itself back up into it's original 3D form.

Cotty what I was looking for was a plugin that will unfold a model the same as Flattery does but also then folds the model back up into its original shape before being unfolded.

Basically I am wanting to use Gimp to create a texture, possibly a UV map where I can then place the UV Map from the graphics program over the unfolded model faces click a button and the image created in GIMP appears on all of the surfaces of the unfolded model.

I was wondering is there a plugin that will unfold my 3D Model into the faces that it is comprised of so that I can texture the faces as a single entity and then fold the 3D model back together into the original 3D model?

I have used the Flattery plugin which works great unfolding the model but it lacks the ability to fold the model back up into the original model in 3D.

I am involved with a group that designs Mods for a popular online game called Homeworld. The name of the mod is called HomeWorld Complex.

http://complex.mastertopforum.com/portal.php

I use Sketch Up to create my models for the mod. The problem is texturing them without having to recreate each panel in Gimp so that the textures can be applied.

Is there a way to unfold the 3D model so that all of the panels will lay flat on the Sketch Up Table so that each panel can then be textured?

Basically it would be awesome if a plugin was created that would first unfold the 3D model into a 2D panel system.

Each panel would then be selected and imported into Gimp so that it would retain overall size. Once texute would then be copied and pasted on the Sketch Up Panel for an exact fit.

Once the model had been textured the second function called Fold Up would rebuild the model to its original shape.

Are there any plugins available that would preform this action?

Also if anyone is interested the HomeWorld Complex Team is looking for more volunteers to assist in the HomeWorld Complex team.

Hopefully if we can get enough modelers together Relic will build the team to launch HomeWorld 3 from the Complex Team.