Faster workflow for preparing hundreds of folded sheet-metal panels

[laurent_delrieu]

Hello

Yes as @skysurfer said Grasshopper will help a lot. My workflow is to make the tools myself and put that in a plugin (Nautilus), I don’t say my plugin is the solution as I don’t fold with a machine my pieces. Also what you do is quite classical so there is perhaps a good solution somewhere.

For the unroll I rely on my own tool as I want to have planes, curves points and I’ll make new tool every time I’ll need new tools.

Unrolling consistency is something I have and I just tested Unroll for OpenNEst and yes it is not consistent !! Lines are the normals

OpenNEst

Nautilus (not free)

Also you need to have a goo orientation at the beginning, I have a tool that flip meshes with initial mesh (I don’t work with Brep)

For pieces names, attribute are better, I worked with Elefront but now there is Gh legacy command.

To arrange pieces in an array I have a tool to Pack.

I choose not to mark number pieces (sometime I paint them), sometime I do a cut .

I choose to use Rhino and a Pdf,

Nautilus Plugin

No update for quite long, but I made a lot of tools, for my own use at the moment. Following this discussion I did a component that makes “fur” The component uses a function (graph mapper, curve, equation) to make the fur profile, gravity is a vector field, wind is a vector field, length of fur is described with a scalar field. [Sans titre 1] [Sans titre 5] [Sans titre 3] There is also a 2 little components One that generate image from curve regions, and one that generate a pdf from…

Marking the folding could be quite simple to do (if you use your own unroller)

Ivy plugin seems quite worth looking at.

https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/ivy

Here some of my projects

Low Table PatDef

Here some pictures of my last project. [IMG_6302_min] [IMG_6296_min] [IMG_6312_min] There will be 9 suction cups to maintian the 800 mm glass [render] The table is done with 235 (62 + 65 + 4*2) laser cutted 1 mm thick aluminium pieces. 65 pieces where painted in black. Non painted piece were engraved. The were cutted by “Le metalist” https://www.lemetalist.fr. Junction pieces were doubled to augment the rigidity. All pieces are hold together by 1981 (1945 + 36) 3.2 mm aluminium alumini…

Here is my last project