How to bend an element around an oval

[Andrew Mac]

I have a 2' high stage that is an oval shape.  I have a 2" thick wood design element that I would like to wrap around the stage but don't know how to do it.  Any ideas?  I am attaching the file with the shape of the stage and the element I want to wrap around it.

wrapping_around_stage.vwx

[mike m oz]

Use the Deform tool in Bend Solid Mode (Model Toolset).

 

 

[Kevin McAllister]

Mike's approach would work if you were willing to simplify the oval into arcs from 3 circles, but matching up the joins may be a challenge. You'll also need to redraw or compose all the NURBS surfaces that make up the object into a solid, since the Deform tool doesn't work on NURBS or groups. 

 

To draw it in Vectorworks I would approach it by extracting the front surface, shelling it, laying out a series of extrudes of the negative pattern along an oval path and then solid subtracting them.

 

Ultimately though, I would recommend Flow or Flow Along Surface in Rhino. These tools are designed for exactly what you're trying to do.

 

Kevin

 

 

 

Edited June 7, 2017 by Kevin McAllister

[Kevin McAllister]

I just experimented a bit with Mike's approach. It seems like it might be possible. Here are the steps I did and an example file -

1. I redrew your design as a nice clean extrude. I then added six of them together as a solid addition.
2. I extracted the top surface of the stage. I tried decomposing this but VW wouldn't break it down. I then split the oval in half using a line and Clip Surface. I decomposed the resulting half oval.
3. The resulting half oval had six polyline segments. Using the Arc Tool in three point mode, I redrew three segments (one quarter of the oval) as arcs. The resulting curve is very close to your original oval.
4. I reoriented the geometry facing me for ease of working. I also aligned the piece to be deformed with the curve end (centre of the front face).
5. I noted the arc length of each segment from the OIP. These are needed to deform it in three different operations.
6. Using the deform tool I bent the first segment. The process is click on the object to be deformed, click on the start point, tab into the floating datum bar, enter the first arc length and hit enter, align the deform line along the object to be deformed at the correct length (end of the red line) and deform, snapping to the end of the arc segment. The Deform tool needs to be in Bend Solid Mode with Symmetric mode off and Finite Length mode on.
7. Repeat for the next segment, choosing the end of the first arc as the starting point and using the length of the second arc as the bend length.
8. Repeat again for the third segment.

Its not the easiest operation especially because of the way the Deform tool highlights objects. And part of the geometry disappeared in the process and I'm not sure why. @JimWmaybe you know where the missing geometry disappears to?

 

Kevin

 

wrapping_around_stage_KM.vwx

[mjm]

Kevin, thanks for the detailed breakdown, including the "where's Waldo" bit.

[markdd]

I tried this and Kevin's method works well. In this instance though, would this not be a good application for using a texture?