Sheet metal unrolling

Grasshopper
,
1

Hi all,

I was hunting for methods with which I could convert existing surfaces (inside a model), to sheet metal along with bending allowances and fold lines.

Intensive Fields Lab seems to have achieved it through some in-house coding.They have worked it out so that they don’t need solidworks or inventor. It seems like a really empowering tool considering grasshopper’s capabilities. But I don’t think that they are going to release the plug-in for sale/trial:

I was hoping that the final unrolled output would change as well, according to the change in input.

Is there any plug-in or method that currently supports this? I have tried using unroll before, but the results are less than accurate when it comes to metals with higher thicknesses.

For reference, I have already checked the following threads but couldn’t find what I was looking for:

  1. Looking for a dynamic surface(sheet metal) unroll plugin or similar - #15 by Willem
  2. Unrollsrf command for sheet metal purposes? - #2 by davidcockey

Images for reference: (Left-input vs Right-output)

image
image711×393 143 KB

The way Solidworks does it quite admirable, you get the fold lines, along with flattened part and bend allowances

Any help is much appreciated

2

you may want to look into the following grasshopper plugin:

3

Many thanks, will start experimenting with it

4

I’m curious to understand how a mesh plugin can unfold Breps…