Hi Matt, unrolling is a very substantial and complex operation, it's not really something that can be produced very easily just by a script.

Scripts are best at doing things by automating existing functions and gluing several operations together. A surface unroll is not much like that at all, it's more of a completely new function.

I don't think it's very feasible for me to do surface unrolling in MoI - there is one developer at Rhino that spends a lot of time just on that one feature alone. It's pretty difficult for me to undertake tasks that take a substantial amount of development time like that.

So for the foreseeable future I would recommend using Rhino to do that particular task, it is not likely to be something that I will be able to add into MoI in any near time frame.

There are various other complications with it as well - only certain kinds of surfaces ("Developable surfaces") can be precisely unrolled, not just any surface that you might create. Most surfaces that you construct with compound curvature in them cannot be unrolled to a flat pattern exactly, for example a sphere surface cannot be unrolled to a flat pattern without incorporating a whole lot of stretching and/or compressing of the material involved.

So really to do unrolling very well would not only involve the unrolling itself but also a bunch of other tools involving developable surfaces, stuff like analyzing whether a surface is developable or not, maybe some construction tools that limited themselves to only construct things that were straight in one direction and thus developable, etc... So taken all together that's a huge amount of work really.

You also might want to look at Lamina Design, it takes polygon mesh input and can do an unwrap of the mesh: http://laminadesign.com/

- Michael