ChrisA Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 I would like to create 2D shapes from a curved 3d objects. In other words I would like to know if VW has the capabilities of generating flatten shapes from a biomorphic object. Say I had an egg that i wanted to flatten out into the many canoe like curved panels that would make up the egg shape. can I find those shapes using VW. Cheers Chris Quote Link to comment
Benson Shaw Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 It's called the Unfold Surfaces command. You might want to save and work on a duplicate of the object in a new file, to isolate in case difficult objects cause a crash. It is available in Vectorworks 2010. It only works for "developable" shapes composed of NURBS surfaces or CSG solids. Cones, cylinders, ribbons, many others. Select your object. Convert to NURBS if necessary. Model>3d Powerpack>Unfold Surfaces. It will not work on dished shapes like your egg/canoe segments. They would need to be treated like a Mercator projection or other process involving compression or stretching of the shape to make it fit on a plane. Give it a try, but I doubt your canoes will unfold. -B Quote Link to comment
Benson Shaw Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 If you could make the egg out of many faceted surfaces (flat bottom canoes), they would unfold. For example slice your egg into canoes. For any canoe: Extract the two edges. Make them same direction if needed. Loft them with no rail, ruled option. That NURBS surface will unfold. If there are enough of them, they will look like a dished surface until you zoom in. -B Quote Link to comment
bcd Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 Also check out TouchCad http://www.touchcad.com/ it can do this directly. Quote Link to comment
ludesign Posted May 8, 2012 Share Posted May 8, 2012 TouchCAD can model and unfold pretty much anything, and it does it quickly. The sample model took just three days to free form model from scratch, to nested ready to machine cut files. 212 unfolded panels over 493 square meters of fabrics. TouchCAD also does high resolution image unfolds. Last week I finished a 208 square meter dome completely covered by a unfolded image at 40 DPI. Half of the dome generated a 348 megapixel image (my iPhone has five megapixels). http://www.touchcad.com/Resources/grafikevolution8.jpeg Quote Link to comment
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