Shape bending / box making
-
Dear SketchUcation community.
I m rather new to Sketch Up, especially the plug in world, however, I am familiar with the basics.I was trying to find a functionality to be able to bend shapes. The purpose is to build a box with sheet material, respectively build a box that can then be unwrapped to get the shape that would need to be cut out of the flat material.
Hope that was not too confusing......
-
Have you got a photo of an example?
You can use Jim's jf unfold.rb to unfold a shape you've created. Maybe that would do the trick? Click on the red Plugin Index button at the top of the screen.
-
@dave r said:
Have you got a photo of an example?
You can use Jim's jf unfold.rb to unfold a shape you've created. Maybe that would do the trick? Click on the red Plugin Index button at the top of the screen.
Hi Dave,
thanks for your response. This picture should explain the problem....its about the growth / shrinkage in the bended material....
-
I don't know of a plugin for SketchUp that will deal with the expansion and shrinkage that occurs when bending metal. The unfold plugins that I'm aware of only work on faces which technically have no thickness. Chris Fillmer's Shape Bender plugin could bend a 3D shape to approximate the shape of the bent metal but I wouldn't expect a great deal of accuracy in trying to determine the difference between the flat sheet and the bent. If you need to be able to accurately determine the shape while taking into consideration expansion and shrinking that occurs in the metal during bending, I think you should be looking at some other software package that is designed for that.
-
For information:
http://www.ciri.org.nz/bendworks/bending.pdf -
Hey! Thanks for that link. There's some interesting information there.
Advertisement