I would like to take my model made exclusively of blocks
and lay them all out flat
All my blocks are flat extrusions to similar extrusion depths,
put together into a 3d shape.
I then turn off the 3d layer and am left with the cut layer, which I can then manually nest.
Hello - are the blocks oriented after being created say at the origin? i.e. can you simply insert a new instance of the block on the CPlane and have it oriented ‘flat’?
-Pascal
I can bring in a new insert and orient it flat, but I can only bring in one block at a time which is time consuming searching for the file name, making the number of copies required, orienting, I usually do this but there is currently nearly 300 blocks in my model.
Is there any way to bring in a lot of blocks at once? They are constructed flat.and then to spread them out, say they all insert at origin flat, to spread them out so they have say 10mm gap between them?
Hello - yeah, it can probably be scripted - I’ll see if I can cook something up.
@lifetime - here’s a quick try - see if it does about the right thing. It uses a MultiListBox now so you can more easily select (Shift or Ctrl click) muliple blocks to insert.
InsertBlockArray.py (1.2 KB)
@lifetime - this version is modified to lay the blocks out vertically centered on the World XY plane - does that do what you need?
To use the Python script use RunPythonScript
, or a macro:
_-RunPythonScript "Full path to py file inside double-quotes"
-Pascal
Thanks, much appreciated
@pascal Thanks I quickly tried it and it worked a dream, only
we extrude both sides equally, so the centre - cutting line is zeroed,
currently the bottom of the extrusion sits on the zero plane,
would it be possible to have the cutting line there ?
Thanks
Hello - by cutting line do you mean the vertical-center plane, the original location of the curve, so to speak, should be at Z=zero?
-Pascal
yes z=0, yes it is the original curve, so we turn off the 3d layer, and ready to cut the 2d, ( of course flatten it etc as well)
Yes thanks, I didn’t see it until the email came.
Yes does exactly what I asked for thank you.