Still a bit experimental, and it’s only for planar panels but I feel like I’m finally getting a reasonable automated surface unfolder using Repeat/Divide. And once you have a rationalized surface (also look here) and the panel itself, the creation of accurate unfolded geometry is ridiculously easy.
The last real problem was figuring out a sensible way to control the layout of the unfolded panels.
It leverages the same panel shown in this post on the reporter pattern:
Where the green surface is essentially a projection of the yellow panel geometry. The yellow panel is created in point 1-4, measures its self, then redraws another quadrilateral based on these measurements on the workplane of point 5 (point 6 isn’t used). A single instance of the panel is placed on 2 divided surfaces, points 1-4 on your base surface, 5 and 6 on a surface to structure your layout. Select the component and hit Repeat.
Voila
Ready for layout on a sheet for annotation.
Not everything that is needed for fabrication certainly, but would be interested to hear any feedback. It works for flats, but it doesn’t have real geometry for compound miters. That can be recorded in tabular format, if not made graphical.
For whole flat surfaces that just have plain extruded panels without compound miters, you could do complete shop-drawing-ready unfolds
Download the panel and sample datasets from here.
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5 comments:
That´s great, I´m Marco from Costa Rica, I´m sorry because of my english, my lenguage is spanish. one question do yo have some thing about Adaptive Tensegrity in revit? Thanks
Nice work!!
You always inspire me Mr. Kron.
Hi
i managed to create this panel and when i started placing it manually, it worked well. But then i tried to "Repeat" it over the divided surface and i get a message "There is only one component in this repeater". Any idea what might cause this?
i created the panel in revit 2012, loaded into Vasari Beta 1.0. I even tried your panel in vasari to repeat it - same message.
Velislav Nikolov
This is great - thanks Zach!
Related question - how far has REVIT/VASARI gotten in the quest to supress the laws of physics and create an unfolded flat elevation of non-planar surfaces? (i.e. wrestling a curved corner curtain wall elevation onto a flat piece of digital paper?)
Hi Ry,
Supressing the laws of physics has never been our strong suit. There are other unfolding and flattening tools, like 123d Make, but I have a hard time getting most non-custom scripted tools to make a flattened document that is what I'm looking for. I've really enjoyed Pepakura, and I think that with properly configured inputs, it does a great job for paper models. But having an automated process for making flat elevations would, IMHO, be both very useful and much more complicated than it initially seems. I nice project for an API programmer out there?
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