Flow as an "unfold tool"

 From:  Michael Gibson
7406.6 In reply to 7406.5 
Hi Mik, re: "Stretch radius only" - I guess it's possible but it would be a really special case option that could only be enabled for very specific structures that had separate faces right at the areas where it changed from stretch to non-stretch. It would be bad to try and use it on say one big surface that crossed over the spots that switched from stretch to non-stretch because the deformation function would be discontinuous in those spots. It would likely cause a strange sort of hiccup right at those locations. For example in your case there it looks like the side walls are long surfaces that cross over those zones so those surfaces would be problematic.

So it would require flow to analyze your faces and figure out which pieces were associated with which segments which could be kind of tricky... It would probably be more robust to have a special purpose separate command that would do it, maybe something that did one bend at a time and you selected the bent faces before running the command so it would not have to try and analyze your geometry to find them. I'm not quite sure what would be involved in making that exactly.

- Michael