Hi Dan,

> Is it possible in MoI by some method, to flatten a curved surface?

No, there are not any functions built in to MoI to do that.

Probably your best bet for that purpose would be to take your data into Rhino, and then there is a command in Rhino called UnrollSrf that can do what you want over there.


That unrolling process is not going to be very feasible to attempt to do manually, moving control points is just not going to produce the right result, the process for unrolling needs to look more directly at the lengths of the pieces being unrolled and there is not something like a 1 to 1 relationship where moving a control point by one distance means that a curve's length (as traveled along the curve) gets altered by the same amount.


Like Anis mentions above, there also some other options:

Lamina Design: http://www.laminadesign.com
Pepakura Designer: http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

Those programs produce a flattened layout of polygonal data.


But if you have a developable surface that you want to cut out of stock and then bend into shape, Rhino's UnrollSrf command would be the way to go with that.


MoI itself just does not have any specialized focus on producing or flattening developable surfaces, you will need to use a program that is more focused in these particular areas to do those kinds of things.

- Michael