Bending Object ?

 From:  Michael Gibson
4813.4 In reply to 4813.3 
Hi Anis - that kind of bending looks like one of those sheet metal operations, which is a fairly different kind of operation than the deformation type process that Flow uses.

Flow basically does a reconstruction of all the surfaces in your model to transform things like planes that only have 4 corner control points into flexy surfaces that have more control points added into them as needed in order to flex.

The kind of operation that you are showing there takes a pretty different approach, putting in things similar to fillet surfaces between pieces rather than doing a deformation/refitting type process.

So I'm not sure that either Flow or a Bend tool based on the same deformation method would really be an exact replacement for that kind of sheet metal operation. It might work for some things though.

If you want to try it, you would just use a base curve and a target curve like this:



Then your flat object goes around the base line like this:



Then Flow can give you this result:




But notice there how each surface in the original stays as one surface in the deformed result - that one-to-one matching may cause you some problems in things like when you have a thick part that would need to become segmented in order to do a proper sheet metal type bend on it, which would otherwise get bunched up when it stays all as one surface that is being deformed.

So I'm not sure that the deformation tools are quite a match with what you need there, maybe to some extent though.

- Michael