Unroll Surface and Breps

The Unroller script has been reworked from scratch. And is a lot more reliable with Brep input. As well the placement of the unrolled surfaces works a lot better now.

The script has turned into a userobject. You need to place the .ghuser file in the UserObject folder of Grasshopper (File - Special Folders - User Object Folder). Thats all, after drop you can use it without a restart of GH or Rhino.

Contact me if you have some question or for bug reports.

Enjoy!

Attachments:

Unroll.ghuser, 23 KB
Unroll_example.gh, 161 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on February 14, 2013 at 7:34am

Hi Christian,

you might explode the polysurfaces...it's not working with breps...it's was because it made some trouble with laying out the parts on the plane.

After the unroll you can group them since the explode makes proper datatree structure and you don't loose the connectivity of the surfs of one brep.

By the way it will "explode" the brep anyway if you have to unroll it.

Cheers FF

Permalink Reply by Marc Johnson on March 3, 2013 at 8:00am

Thank you for sharing this file. It is working great. However, would that be possible to label the unroll elements as well ? thank you.

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on March 4, 2013 at 4:58am

Hi Marc,

This would be possible for sure. Can you explain how this should work? Do you mean the labelling like it is done in Rhino when unrolling? Or do you prefer to label every unrolled piece with a number and or name?

Do you have an example file, so i can give it a quick look and maybe work something out.

Best regards

Permalink Reply by Thomas J. Mrokon on April 4, 2013 at 2:32am

Hi Florian,

I searched the forum for a nice unroll solution and found your piece of code. It works great and maybe you can easily add some lines to make it perfect.

Marc already asked for a labeling option. Maybe it is usefull to have a string-input for additional prefixes. This labeling would be nice for each input (surface, curves and points) and separated for the original and the unrolled geometry.

Organizing the output could be done with GH, but it would be much more effective to have some options for the output-frames. First, defining the start point for creating the frames. At the moment they are created at rhinos origin. And maybe it is nice to have a layout option for a vertical, horizontal or even a grid arrangement.

just some ideas....

cheers...

Thomas

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on April 5, 2013 at 1:45am

Hallo Thomas,

it's already on my shedule, to do some major changes to this tool.

The labeling was a completely different issue on each of the projects where i used this tool. It depends on the needs of the project tasks. Although i think this is a really important thing and hope to get a way of organizing this in a generic way, so that it can be used with different preferences within the unroller itself.

The frames is something, that i've added with the last revision of this tool. I've found it really useful, because we had to do a lot of Layouts and in general the output was structured in a uniform manner, before it was just laying them out somehow. In theory the grid arrangement should work. It worked for my situation but i've encountered Path structures where the arrangement algorithm fails. This has to be reworked also.

Thank you very much for your suggestions it's very important to me, to have some feedback. If you like to place some screenshots explaining your idea with an example, i think this can get a nice discussion and other users can share their experience.

Best regards,

Permalink Reply by Thomas J. Mrokon on April 8, 2013 at 12:53am

Hi Frank,

good to see that your component is still under development...

Here are some screenshots how I am using it.

Labeling the original surface to identify the unrolled surface:

Here is an overview of some unrolled surfaces. The layout depends of different breps and their singles surfaces.

Each frame has its name, and some information about the area and the dimensions.

At the moment I am thinking of creating the frames depending on the printing size. So you can setup the layout and GH fits the unrolled surfaces onto the paper size.

Another very interesting thing is to setup a slab size for the unrolled surface to find out how many slabs are needed to build up the surface.

best,

Thomas

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on April 9, 2013 at 1:27pm

Thank you Thomas, this is a great example. Indeed the frames are thought for creating layouts afterwards.

The frames should be the right paper size so you can directly use them for creating layouts. Take a Look at the Rhino Plugin LayoutManager (Food4Rhino).

At work we created like 2000 layouts within some minutes with the LayoutManager.

I'll let you know when i have done some changes to the Unroller.

Cheers,

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on May 2, 2013 at 6:40pm

Hi Thomas,

I've totally reworked the script now and i think it works a lot better now. I've worked out some of your suggestions and they make sense to me. Thanks a lot for your input ;-)

Cheers FF

Permalink Reply by Thomas J. Mrokon on May 3, 2013 at 2:26am

Hi Florian,

that sounds good. I can´t wait testing it, because I ran into trouble with the previous version. The uploaded file shows a situation with some geometry which seems clean but when I activate the unroller rhino and GH crashes. Do you have any idea?

Best,

Thomas

Attachments:

Crash-Unroll.gh, 100 KB

Permalink Reply by Florian Frank on May 3, 2013 at 5:42am

Hi Thomas,

It works with the new Tool...ca 2 sec calculation time.

important is, that you flatten the points and curves, cause your datatree structure isn't the same for both. This may cause the really long calculation, that results in a crash of rhino and gh.