Hey Everyone,
The design I’m working on has several panels that are to be fabricated by a laser cutting facility. I’ve tried the basic approach of selecting one of these panels and “exporting as DWG”, but I get a file that has duplicate lines and holes, etc. Presumably this is because making the 2D version of the 3D panel just “squashes” the drawing so I see the front and back edges as lines?
Anyways… is there an easy/best-practice way of doing this? Maybe an easy way of removing the duplicates or properly “projecting” the panel to 2D before exporting to DWG? I’m all ears… thank you.
Are they flat panels that are basically just extrusions of planar curves? If so, you can use DupFaceBorder on one of the main faces (the one lying on the CPlane if possible) to get all the curves that represent the outer border and the holes in one shot.
Adding to the suggestions here. Regarding duplicate lines:
Depending on who will do the laser cutting in most cases it will go through another piece of software before being transferred to the laser cutter. In most cases they will detect and remove duplicate lines - at least the 2 laser softwares I have used both had that and you would run that command before lasering anyways.
So I think it makes sense to also find out what format and preperations are needed by the person lasering it. Nobody will take your file without checking it first anyways.
That said the Project and Make2D are great commands. Also usually we use a small grasshopper patch to check for non-closed curves and usually already do nesting using OpenNest.
Thank you,
DupFaceBorder did exactly what I wanted and the laser cut parts came out great.
I ran into a problem with a few curves that I drew in Rhino using the ellipse tools. The company I use for laser cutting runs older machines and hardware and ellipses get converted into hundreds of tiny line-segments that causes the laser cutting machine to burn the material. I just re-drew the ellipses as several regular curve segments and it worked out.