Building an SR-71 Blackbird from Paper: A Guide to Low-Poly Paper Modeling

This article details the author's journey in creating a low-poly paper model of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft, covering the entire process from design to assembly. The author emphasizes balancing goals like ease of assembly, aesthetic appeal, and minimal resource consumption, while setting constraints such as using only single-color paper and employing only polyhedral shapes. The article thoroughly explains the use of Blender for mesh modeling, Pepakura Designer for mesh unfolding, and assembly techniques, and shares experiences of iteratively refining the model. The result is an impressive SR-71 Blackbird paper model, with PDFs available for download.