Hi everyone, I am trying to understand, how the unfolding feature can be helpful for designing process. Because you can use the unfolded view tool to create sketches.
Any idea?
There are tons of possibilities. You shouldn't force yourself to use unfold for the sake of a sketch, but here are a few examples:
1) Section layouts for advanced surfaces - great for analyzing on paper, or developing tooling layouts.
2) flat patterns. Really good tool for flat patterning of materials which do not require K-factor. (cloth, paper, etc)
3) Reverse Engineering. I've found it useful for this in CFD applications. (and I'm sure there are more)
4) Anything that requires a law or graph can utilize this function to create the linear layout.
Probably I'm missing something obvious, but this should illustrate just a few of the ways.
Solid7 has mentioned some good examples...We use this tool to define holes on our curved flanges thus resulting in proper circles rather than splines on our flat patterns which speeds up the nc process for our puching machines...