Need to unfold a 3D solid

[Beefy]

Hi Everyone,

I've got Alibre Design Standard and have drawn an excavator bucket. These taper towards the back so when the curved part of the bucket is unfolded it will have a somewhat hourglass shape.

I'm trying to find some cheap software which can do this. I believe the higher end packages can (Solidworks, Inventor, Ironcad, etc) but to do one little unfold I wouldn't even consider it.

I've downloaded a PDF brochure for a program called "Sheet Metal Optimizer" by Catalcad but any links you can find don't take you anywhere. I'm wondering if this Catalcad doesn't exist anymore.

Does anyone know of this one or have any other methods to do this unfolding and leave me with a flat pattern 2D vector file so I can get this part CNC cut.

I've seen the 2006 version of Sheet Metal Optimizer advertised on many OEM software selling sites but I don't know if these are an illegal scam. Does anyone know what these OEM software selling sites are all about ???

Thanks,

Keith

[mcphill]

I have SolidWorks, and would be happy to help, but I don't know the sheetmetal portion of the program very well. Can you post the file, and if I can figure it out, I will send you the "flat" version. Maybe someone more familiar will chime in with a known/more reliable success path...

[cad01]

Alibre Pro has sheetmetal support. small upgrade fee and its already in a program your familiar with.

[Beefy]

Thanks for your replies Mcphill & Cad01.

Mcphill, I very much appreciate your kind offer to help me out. However I'm going to persevere to try and find some simple solution to my problem. I will no doubt use an unfolding feature more as time goes by and I couldn't rely on someone else each time I need to do this. But anyway thanks again.

Cad01, I have already looked into that but the unfold feature in Alibre only seems to work on sheetmetal parts made specifically with it's sheetmetal commands. There are warnings against trying to unfold parts made with the 3D modelling commands for which the unfold function is not designed. I need to basically take a face from a 3D model and flatten that.

[diycnc]

most soft wares will only unflold solids if they are flat surfaces. if there is any compound bends most will cack out. why not post a screen shot of what your trying to unfold? your best bet would probably be upgrade your albre software and model the bucket using the sheet metal tools.

pro engineer would most likely unfold what your looking at but its over 10g's a seat..