When will the function similar to SolidWorks sheet metal unfolding be available in rhino
Bricscad has achieved the function of bending and unfolding sheet metal
Probably never for several reasons.
- Rhino is a surface modeler, not a solid modeler
- Rhino has no concept of material properties that effect how solid modeler style unfolding works.
That doesn’t mean a third-party developer could not write one, but that isn’t likely either since the tool exists in several solid modelers.
Sorry.
Probably never, it’s a pretty niche market.
Of course it’s not really “sheet metal unfolding,” it’s an entirely different, limited set of “sheetmetal features” that it inherently knows how to unfold and that’s all it knows how to unfold.
The way I’ve done fabricated sheet metal parts is to just 3D model what I want and it’s part of the very expensive service of the fabricator that they remodel it in whatever they want to use, which they may well want to do regardless as that fabrication is as much art as science. Of course once they made their model 2" too big and $20K of parts turned out exactly precisely perfectly wrong…
Have also wondered about whether this sort of feature is ever likely to come to Rhino. I’ve seen sheet metal designs that were realized both without and without the SW plugins - and …
… checked out with that experience. (even with the plugin output, the fabricator only used it as a reference)
As a relative noob to nurbs and surface modeling, @John_Brock could you kindly expand on why -
… not being a solid modeler leads to that conclusion? Mainly curious because I’ve had some success using a sort of surgical approach in Rhino to decent effect making bent sheet-stock models by extracting specific contiguous faces on a polygon, performing offsets (2D and 3D) and various selective joins. (this was for flexible circuit polyimide material rather than metal, but similar in concept). From that workflow it seemed to me like a metal sheet bending design would be fairly natural.
'Cause the factors that determine what sort of allowances are needed vary a lot. If you’re just making a rough prototype you can model the “middle surface” and that’ll work well enough for many processes, but for trying to achieve any sort of real tolerances that’s gonna vary by the quirks of the machine, the stock being fed into it, the phase of the moon… They’ve got their process and they’re not gonna risk it on your weird model.
There are just several layers of stuff on top of the basic “modeling” that go into a “sheetmetal module” that Rhino just does not at this point have. No one in their right mind is going to implement that themselves for a niche of a niche market.
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