Okay, let's say you have a wireframe model. It's a surface, composed of tiled triangular polygons, represented as vertex and face lists (aka, a .OBJ file).
To create an equivalent object in real life, you'll need an internal support structure.
You could stop here and 3d print the surface combined with the support structure, but 3d printing is expensive and severely volume-limited. So instead, let's decompose the structure into Tyvek cells that will be laser-cut(red) and laser-perforated(blue) and assembled into the original surface.
Then, you fold the cells and assemble the individual cells to form the final surface
The result makes a great lantern.
-TODO: more information-dense explanation, drop conversational tone