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Unfolding a Nurbs surface


jpps

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I have created a nurbs surface that was intended to be made of fabric.  What I want to do is unfold or triangulate the surface to make a paper pattern as a test piece.  When I am able to unfold the surface with the unfold as facets option selected it is a pretty complex pattern.  Any tips on ways to simplify the surface while still maintaining the intended shape?  The shape was created as a boundary nurbs surface with two straight parallel sides and two complex curves.  I have attached a jpeg of the shape if that helps.

post-10730-0-07351000-1434057078_thumb.jpg

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You've built a non-developable surface - a surface that can't be unfolded without stretching the material from which it would be made. Hence the fact the FZ needs to convert it to a complex facetted pattern as an approximation.

 

 

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I appreciate your answer though it is something I was already aware of.  I just read on a past post to the Forum about a Make Developable surface tool FormZ was working on.  Has this been released yet?  about 17 years ago while in college we used FormZ to create the patterns of two tensile sails we actually fabricated.  I think we used the same or similar tools then and they were of similar complexity.  

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Make a copy of the surface and use the polygon tool to convert it to facetted.  Set Normal Angle and Fraction of bounding box to high numbers and then the "Minimum Grid Lines" will override and you can set a resolution you like (I set 4x4 in my example).  Then you can triangulate and unfold a simplified version of your shape.

 

post-176-0-68185000-1434128229_thumb.png

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