All,

I read some old posts pertaining to bend/unbend. Did an unbend tool ever make it into the code?

thanks...

I think sheet metal tools were proposed - but passed over

A little demo to move forward without an Unbend utility.

PowerPack Pro's unroll tool flattens meshes and unrolls ruled surfaces. It's not bulletproof on every ruled surface, some need untrimming if there are cutouts, but sheet metal tools are normally limited to cylindrical surface sections only, so PPPunroll is more powerful than that. If you wanted to use it for sheet metal, you'd have to work out the neutral depth/k factor manually and place the bend material start and centre lines yourself, and you'd have to split the surface if there were reverse-direction bends on the one piece. It's the bare bones of sheet metal functionality, but the mesh flattening is good for other things from ductwork transitions to paper modelling, and I've used general ruled surface unrolling for tasks from developing panels used in commercial custom fabricated satellite dishes up to 7.5m, to simple glue-and-stitch ply canoes, so it has cross-discipline functionality.

That advice only stands if the part has been bent in PunchCAD and the bend parameters take no account of the material or processing, so it won't be accurate to sheet metal production standards. If it's an import from another app, there are no bend features to edit, flattening a sheet metal design in PunchCAD means identifying the bends, finding the neutral depth, measuring the arc length of the bend at that depth and establishing the start, middle and end of the bend material. It's not difficult, but the only concession to automation is the arc length measurement.

I'm a long-time user of TurboCAD as well as PunchCAD, and TC first introduced unbending perhaps ten or eleven years ago. Like PunchCAD, the end-product of TC's development goes into the next version release rather than a service release. The first TC efforts were usable, and credit to them for that, but the usability was conditional, so you had to design with the foibles in mind, or edit to take them into account when you used the unbend tool. A lot of users thought that wasn't OK, and grumbled. I chose to take the half-full view rather than the half-empty, which is to consider that for the upgrade price (or the standard price of entry) of the new release, I got a new tool, rather than condemning the publishers for a release with "sheet metal" features that weren't comparable with formal tools that more expensive apps offered. The unbend tool improved incrementally, development to the standard of a "sheet metal" suite took place over nine years, by my reckoning, and they still don't call the tools a "sheet metal" suite. That's probably a "small target" philosophy, because they refer only to the "neutral depth" of the bend. There's nothing referring to "k-factor" anywhere, you do have to know enough to correlate the two. Because of that, and because it's a no-fanfare built-in feature, any critics predisposed to dismiss it in comparison to their fave SW/Alibre/BricsCAD/whatever plug-in or add-on would find it very hard to get past the bang-for-buck.

I don't know if Shark would be coming to the party too late, but Tim and Encore would probably have to crunch some numbers to decide if building in unbend is worth the development cost, and if they offered it as a "sheet metal" plug-in, or built it into PowerPack, would it increase custom through those avenues? As a new feature for SharkCAD Pro, it would probably be justifiable, but if it were to be called a "sheet metal tool", it would have to be full-featured at the outset. I could use PowerPackPro's unroll to semi-automate sheet metal, but TC's unbend is mature automation at this point.

Edited by user Sunday, March 11, 2018 5:35:08 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified