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show sheet metal part part way through the bend order?
david_goodwin014
Member Posts: 5 ✭
I am trying to show a sheet metal part in all its states as you work through the bend order. This is to make sure it does not clash with out tooling. Is this possible? Thank you for reading.
0
Answers
I don't think there is an automatic way to do it so you'll have to do it manually.
How? I think I would take the flat pattern and rebuilt the bends one after the other using the new Bend feature so then you'll have the bending order.
You can use a "move face" (rotate using the cylindrical face of the bend) to change a bend angle (although it might not be happy with setting it to zero), if you have "closed corners" you may need to "finish" the sheet metal part first.
This would be really helpful. We currently export and import into SolidWorks to get this functionality.
There are fragments of a sheet metal unfold feature in the standard library but they aren't exposed to the user. They've been in there since some very early commits of std.fs so I assume there's some user experience reason they never finished implementing and focused on their simultaneous sheet metal functionality. Similarly there's fragments of a sheet metal import recognition feature that have not been implemented in the modern version of the tool that I'm sure have had open bug cases that are hard to squash so they haven't implemented it. I've made some modified copies of these features for debugging purposes and I just made them public for use in this document here.
I originally intended to replicate some workflows from Solidworks with these features where I would unfold a part, do some edits, and then refold the part but as time has gone on I've worked myself away from that mentality and just began developing features which work in the simultaneous sheet metal context. That being the case, if you find using these in a general workflow is unstable or works in unexpected ways that's probably why Onshape never finished implementing them either.