Explode 3D Fabrication into 2D parts on a single plane?

Hi All,

I am looking for guidance as per the title. If anyone has suggestions on a methodology or components I could use that would be excellent!

We are building a scale model of a dam using multiple flat panels, to physically test its spillway.

I built the model in 3D in rhino and our fabricators have requested shop drawings, so I was hoping to use GH to rotate all the parts into a single plane for dimensioning.

Model looks like this:

I was thinking the following may work:

Explode each piece and find the areas for each face.
Find the face with the maximum area and work with that.
Use face with max area as a reference plane
Draw a vector along one edge of face with max area and use this to align with some reference vector.

Not quite sure how I will actually code this up yet, so would appreciate any input if anyone has any ideas.

Kind Regards

Lyndon

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kalin Ngo on February 26, 2017 at 6:44pm

You may be able to do this without Grasshopper - have you tried the Unroll Surface (_UnrollSrf) command in Rhino?

Maybe extracting surfaces (_ExtractSrf) may help too.

Permalink Reply by Lyndon Johnson on February 26, 2017 at 6:51pm

Hi Kalin,

Unfortunately these commands wont help in my case. Since each of the individual parts are 3D and represent the material they will be built from.

I need to somehow unroll a a hole set of 3D objects.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Kind Regards

Lyndon

Permalink Reply by Mohamed Naeim on February 26, 2017 at 8:15pm

Try Ivy

It's a plugin

Permalink Reply by Lyndon Johnson on February 26, 2017 at 8:25pm

A quick look, and it appears this is for Mesh's so i doubt it will work for 3D solids. Have not tried it however - Kalin has given me a good solution i think.

Permalink Reply by Kalin Ngo on February 26, 2017 at 8:16pm

I would guess the long ways about it would be to _ExtractSrf or _DupFaceBorder each object individually, then orient them however you need to.

Through Grasshopper, you could try these:

However, the projected faces still need to be moved around on the plane to avoid overlap.

I hope this helps!

Attachments:

unnamedfeb26.2.gh, 12 KB

Permalink Reply by Lyndon Johnson on February 26, 2017 at 8:24pm

Thanks Kalin,
I think your definition gets me most of the way there.

I need to retain the 3D geometry as some panels have chamfers on edges, but plugging the breps back into the geometry on the orient component should do that.

I might write something to space them out as well - and will upload once I am done.

Thank you for the help!

Permalink Reply by Lyndon Johnson on February 28, 2017 at 10:12pm

Thanks all for your assistance.

I have the script up and running and it has saved us a bunch of time. I added labels to the original model (Coarse, but functional), rotated and separated all the parts and added labels and layer names to the exploded view.

Model View: