Sheet metal unrolling

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)

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

Any help is much appreciated

you may want to look into the following grasshopper plugin:

Many thanks, will start experimenting with it

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