Hi Guy, you might take a look at Lamina Design: http://laminadesign.com/index.html - it's focused on generating a 2D pattern from 3D shapes.

You can export from MoI to Lamina Design using OBJ format, try using the option for "Triangles only" when doing the export.

- Michael

Check out Terraflat for Rhino. Terraflat may have been renamed to Exactflat. Not exactly sure what has gone on there. Also, Within Rhino there is a squish command which may be a good fit for flattening in your application. Lamina is pretty good but desperately needs to be updated.



IC

FormZ can handle this as well.

Thanks all for your answers.

Michael, Lamina seems to be a non updated software, and for $360 I could prefer Unfold3D software...

Thanks for others suggestions, but I would prefer to use MoI instead of Rhino, and my original drawing (3D showed with link above) was made within SurfPlan yet. The SurfPlan problem for me is the limitation to already knew kite stuff, because I work on an invention very special (take a look at www.supsailing.info for more details)

Anyway, UV-mapping functionnality seems to be the right name of what I need, and for that I maybe found a little software name Pepakura Designer. But I will investigate further, as Wings3D and Blender for UV-unwraping.

Best Regards,
Guy

There is a yahoo site: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Foildesign/

Did a quick pretend model with the catenary script, offset, rotate, mirror, loft, lineweb, isocurves, and unwrap curve to get the blue lines.

You can "unwrap" curves, to a straight line, but MoI does not have "unwrap surface," as far as I know.

Hi all,

Some news to let you know what about my aim doing "unfold" for a "sail-like-kite" fabric shape.

First I would like to thank you for your ideas, because for instance the information about the Rhino "squish" command will help me a lot : I will design my "sail-like-kite" shape within MoI then I will send only the native 3dm MoI file to my sailmaker and he will be able to "squish" it within his Rhino3D to flatten my shape and obtain the plan he needs to cut sail fabrics. Good friends folks, you save me a lot of time and problems !

Second maybe all this will not be needed as David Aberdeen - the SurfPlan developper - explained to me why SurfPlan shape I have done did not work well (my fault) and he kindly proposed to send me the DXF files to let me work on this, so I will do my task this time within SurfPlan because its aerodynamic settings will help me a lot...

Third all this walk will help me a lot for my future projects : I definitely learned a lot with your help :-)

At last, I have found a pretty good solution to unfold 3d objects just with MoI and light softwares :
1) do your shape within MoI
2) save your file in SketchUp skp file format, fine tuning the meshes
3) within SketchUp you can use the UnfoldTool plugin (http://sketchuptips.blogspot.fr/2007/08/plugin-unfoldrb.html) or maybe better the Flattery one (http://www.pumpkinpirate.info/flattery/)
4) export DXF with a free DXF plugin (http://rhin.crai.archi.fr/rld/plugin_details.php?id=774) or directly in SWG within the Flattery toolbar

Hoping this will help some folks,
Guy

Hi Guy, thanks very much for reporting back with various tips, those definitely might help others, either now or in the future when someone is searching the forum for unfolding tips.

Thanks, - Michael

Thank you very much for your thanks Michael ! ;-)

BTW : unfolding surface could be a very good and very cool functionality to implement in a future MoI version, you don't think so ?

Cordially,
Guy

Hi Guy,

> unfolding surface could be a very good and very cool functionality to implement
> in a future MoI version, you don't think so ?

It would definitely be cool! But unfortunately it's not an area that I really have experience in directly and so it would probably involve a significant amount of research and effort in order to try and work in that area, that makes it fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.

- Michael