Does anyone know a Rhino plug-in for flattening curved surfaces?

This is for a footwear application for designing shoe uppers, and the flattening has to occur without splits, although obviously there will stresses and distortions. - Mike

I use Lamina for Architectural membranes. Very easy to use, accurate, I love it. http://www.laminadesign.com

The workflow for flattening your surface with Lamina is as follows :
1) Create a mesh from your polysurface with the Rhino "_Mesh" tool
2) Since the input is a polysurface, you end up with a polymesh. When imported in Lamina, this will produce multiple flattened shapes. If you want to flatten the whole surface, you need to weld the 5 meshes together, using the "_Weld" command, with 180° as angle tolerance to be sure all is welded properly.
3) Export your mesh to a Rhino V3 file (Lamina will shortly accept V4 files too)
4) Open your mesh in Lamina
5) I recommend that you use the "flexible" setting since you are going to stretch the material a lot (see attached screencap)
6) You're finished. - Olivier 3DI Rhino Newsgroup


Shameless Plug - We sell Lamina at Off Broadway - www.ob.com


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