Unroll or Flatten

[fcris]

Hey All!

Can someone help me flatten or unroll this so we can lasercut and form into this shape?
We can’t find a command to do so.

Thanks,
Frank

Unroll Please.3dm (38.4 KB)

[Vomela]

no way to flatten without distortion on something like this.

Brute force is available from Rhino though.

Here is the tool you’re looking for:

[laurent_delrieu]

Hello
there are many other ways if you want to keep the shape.
You can divide the surface in various parts.
Using Stripping technique

Stripper

Component in Kangaroo
Ivy has also tools

Ivy

You can also use too to cluster mesh
Variational cutting

Variational Surface cutting

No there’s not an implementation in Rhino currently. You can read Nick and Keenan’s paper here: You could generate similar patterns with a curve growth approach like given here, but that won’t result in strictly distortion minimizing patches unless you also implement the energies from the paper above.

Me I do that

Unroll Please.3dm (197.7 KB)

[encephalon]

@fcris

We can’t find a command to do so.

it sounds like a bunch of people avoided to actually learn the software you are intending to use well everything happens, but alright cynical refreshments aside.

you can actually abuse UnrollSrf to do it either but you would have to increase the tolerance to something ridiculous. also as you see you best avoid Smash either since the result is not very good and simply flat on one of the 3 sides like UnrollSrf does. best would probably be Squish with preserve boundary and natural.

you can also make it manually, and since this a part of a sphere and you have layed it down so perfectly already the unrolling is rather straighforward, though that is just theoretically so take it with a grain of salt.

anyway draw a curve with the command Shortpath from the midpoint of one edge to the opposing edge, do this for all 3 or rotate them, they meet at your area centroid, you can check with the command AreaCentroid it should be the same. you can also draw projected straight curves the result is probably the same, then go to the side view and draw 2 circles like so from the AreaCentroid where it touches the ground and draw a curve here in green.

rotate and copy the resulting curve 3 time for each side and connect the edges with interpolated curve.

comparing the shape with the squish result its nearly identical, i still think that the manual approach might be better since the resulting edges and corners are more accurate.

[fcris]

Wow, thanks for all the help guys!

Frank