Hello!
for the purpose of hydroforming "complex" shapes, I figured wings would be an excellent choice.
So I made a simple shape, exported it to STL and tried to use this inkscape plugin : https://trmm.net/Unfolding_STL
However, exporting to STL before doing such operations is nonsense ; also, STL is all triangles so a dodecahedron will not have 12 5-gon faces but 36 triangular faces. If it is not much of an issue when it comes to tape and paper, it does become one when welding is involved. Also, that inkscape extension relies on a windows executable that is not maintained anymore and that has a tendency to lose triangles along the way ; again, this is not much of an issue when building paper shapes but it is when it comes to hydroforming where the shape has to be water-tight.
Wings has almost all the features needed to achieve unfolding objects : IMHO, the best way to do it would be to allow the user to select a number of edges that will either be cut or folded, then click a to-be-made "unfold" button (or maybe rather "export as.. unfolded SVG")
the result for
egg3.wings (Size: 1,014 bytes / Downloads: 3)
should be sth such as
egg3_unfolded_dodecahedron.pdf (Size: 1.31 KB / Downloads: 3)
for the purpose of hydroforming "complex" shapes, I figured wings would be an excellent choice.
So I made a simple shape, exported it to STL and tried to use this inkscape plugin : https://trmm.net/Unfolding_STL
However, exporting to STL before doing such operations is nonsense ; also, STL is all triangles so a dodecahedron will not have 12 5-gon faces but 36 triangular faces. If it is not much of an issue when it comes to tape and paper, it does become one when welding is involved. Also, that inkscape extension relies on a windows executable that is not maintained anymore and that has a tendency to lose triangles along the way ; again, this is not much of an issue when building paper shapes but it is when it comes to hydroforming where the shape has to be water-tight.
Wings has almost all the features needed to achieve unfolding objects : IMHO, the best way to do it would be to allow the user to select a number of edges that will either be cut or folded, then click a to-be-made "unfold" button (or maybe rather "export as.. unfolded SVG")
the result for
egg3.wings (Size: 1,014 bytes / Downloads: 3)
should be sth such as
egg3_unfolded_dodecahedron.pdf (Size: 1.31 KB / Downloads: 3)