I would like to convert this surface to a mesh in order to attempt to use Ivy to unroll it, add taps, and build it from matte board. I’m not too familiar with meshes. I think of them as surfaces that are more difficult to edit and extract data from, but I’m sure that’s incorrect.
In my particular case, I’m not sure how well this will work with the fact my surface has several holes in it. This could be as simple as plugging my joined Breps into one mesh component or a lot more complex. Each tutorial of Ivy I’ve watched, the author appears to be working from a mesh that has visible fold lines on it, yet whenever I try to create a mesh from this surface, it yields one smooth surface (no ridges/fold lines).2018.04.10_mcneel_forum.gh (17.2 KB)
I’m not terribly familiar with Ivy, but here is one approach for unrolling shapes into strips. My goto process for this type of thing is generally to use meshes. The fundamental part is organizing the surface into strips. For that, I find meshes a little easier to work with.
With that said, I also think that the following plugins make this process pretty painless.
-Kangaroo (one or two…both have the “Stripper” and “Unroller” component)
-Weaverbird (an absolute must have, IMHO, for manipulating meshes)
The screenshot and example file show a simplified version of one approach to divide up your surface. It does not account for adding openings to the mesh faces/layout on xy plane/create tabs.
The best way to unroll it using Ivy is to not include the triangular openings within the mesh. In other words, leave the mesh solid, with no holes. The holes, ideally, can be incorporated into the unroll. Below is the video tutorial that shows you how to unroll with Ivy w/ additional geometry. Basically, the additional geometry are the triangular holes in the mesh.
My issue is, each time I plugged the geometry of the holes into the Ivy component to begin incorporating them into the unroll, it gave me an error that the geometry was either not planar, or not on the mesh surface.
I’ve attached my file where you can see the unroll I was able to perform. I’m currently building the model using the cutouts from Ivy. You’ll need lunchbox to open the file.2018.05.29_mcneel_forum.gh (64.1 KB)
Thanks for the comment, I could not find an answer.
I have gone through something similar, without knowing how to solve it.
(with openings / perforations in the mesh)
Finally I found a course on " Ivy" in Thinkparametric.om…, maybe it would work too.
Hi. You can also try another approach.
As your mesh is a tri-mesh its easy to convert it to surface and then combine surfaces into desired groups to get polysurface.
Then you use unroll polysurface with mapping of your opening curves ( or curve points to recreate curves ).
Ooor when you finally unroll your geometry you can apply the opening generation once again but now to geometry on XY plane.
The benefit of Ivy is the unroll can also add flaps for gluing, text identifiers for assembly, and it splits the score cuts into fold-in and fold-out cuts so you know which side to score when cutting your pieces.
