I am trying to see if there are any other methods I could use to take a curved surface and flatten it so I can measure it for production.
the idea is the curved surface is the final form of wood that will be steamed into shape hence why I need to extract the straight length of the surface to know the length of the material I need to order before steaming, bending, etc.
Attached is a test file I put together with my attempts.
I used unrollsrf but found the length for very small to what I actually think it would be.
the unrolled is surface is correct. Since your surface is straight in one direction, you get a perfect unroll. You can verify by measuring one of the longer edges of your curved surface.
Not really, no, not that isn’t just a guess based on the properties of the material. You can’t bend anything (and you’re working in wood??) in 2 directions without the material stretching or compressing, without it flowing like a liquid, so the flat input could be almost anything, all bets are off.
It comes with a factor of error so it’s not “100%” perfect.
There’s also exact flat I think its a paid program for Grasshopper and there might be others that are free check out the package manager or food for Rhino.
Awesome I’ll have to check these out and see how my results vary. I wasn’t sure if Grasshopper had a lot of analysis tools i’ve been meaning to look into it more.