How to bend a shape?

Hi to everyone,

We're struggling on an issue that we cannot solve... and we hope that someone of you have a possible solution...

We created a shape in "the phisical world" using a curved planar strip of paper that is bendend in various ways to obtain a knot. Very easy with the paper... but we are struggling to replicate the same in 3d.

(see attached image)

Why do we need to do this?

The shape needs to be built with a steel sheet in a big scale (4 mt x 4mt x 3 mt) and to bend the metal we can only use simple bending, starting from the strip of steel (planar), and bending it various times.

But we need to have the exact match between the 3d knot and the unrolled starting surface... so that we can then laser cut holes in it according to the curvature (but one thing at time!)

Any idea on how to "bend" the strip in grasshopper / rhino to be able con control the curvature, so that the final bended shape, if you unroll it, matches the starting surface?

We hope it was clear enough to understand the problem!!!

Thanks for your help!

Fil & Jo

ps. at the moment the very bad solution we have, is:

1. model the final shape (bended "knot")

2. model the starting shape (planar)

3. unroll the first

4. Change the first randomly, point by point, so that its unroll matches the starting shape... but there is no precision in this...and hardly we will reach a result...

There must be a way to "bend" a planar shape to obtain a final shape...! (we hope!)

thanks a lot if someone can help on this!