Folding Box Packaging Animation in Blender [Full Process]
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users point people to it when they need to rig and animate a folding box, flaps, or a label wrapping onto a surface.
Recommended by 4 people across 5 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What it is
A 32-minute Blender tutorial by Derek Elliott that models a simple box with flaps, rigs it with an armature to make a folding animation, then animates a graphic label onto the surface. It finishes with lighting, materials and extra animation for a packaging design shot.
What people said
Recommends tomh · 2022-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Using Rigid Body to push something out of a flapped box”
I have a flapped box, and I want to lift an object out of it, forcing the flaps to open as it pushes against them. Here's my sphere failing to open the flaps: [LINK] I have seen an answer here [LINK] , but building the flaps as separate objects means they won't look like they are attached to the cube part of the box. My box flaps have armatures - one bone for each flap, as created in this tutorial [this video] . I found another tutorial [LINK] explaining how to use the "rigid bodys generator" add-on [LINK] , but it hasn't been updated to work with Blender 3.x Is there a way to use armature bones as passive hinged rigid bodies? Or is there some other way?
Recommends Gordon Brinkmann · 2022-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Rotation in edit mode”
For something like a folding box in Blender using bones, which you can adapt for your trousers as well, there are tutorials on Youtube. This is a more recent one: Folding Box Packaging Animation in Blender [this video]
Recommends Evripidis Lalissidis · 2023-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Sheet metal animation”
Hey! I recently used this animation to animate a cardboard box. [this video] I know Youtúbe videos are not preferred for Stackexchange answers but it would be a shame not sharing this
Recommends John Eason · 2023-12 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Creating 'Independent' Child Bone”
There's a complete tutorial from Derek Elliot on a folding box animation here [this video] which might be of use to you.
Recommends John Eason · 2025-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Trying to bend and animate stickers landing onto a mesh”
There's a quite old but still relevant YT tutorial here ( [this video] ) on box folding which includes rolling on a label that might help. The label section starts here [this video] .
Cites tomh · 2022-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Problem with simple armature opening a box”
I'm following this tutorial [this video] , trying to rig a simple armature to open the flaps of a box. In the section at 5m38 [this video] , he rotates the armature to bend a flap. All of my flaps work fine, except for the front flap, which doesn't bend enough. When the armature is rotated to 90 degrees, the flap only gets to about 45 degrees: [LINK] I've assigned and removed the vertex groups several times, but can't work out how to get it to work like all the other bones. What am I doing wrong? Blender file: [LINK]