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Flatten a surface with holes


Code_Breaker
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If the surface is a true Cylinder, then Unroll will work fine. If not, then it gets more complex.

Mastercam ships with a series of C-Hooks that can be used to "flatten" the surface. You must do this in several steps. It gets more complex if your surface is also "trimmed". (I mean the outside boundary. All "holes" are always a trimmed portion of the surface.)

  1. First, create Wireframe geometry (in 3D) on all your surface edges. (both internal and external.)
  2. Now, "Untrim" the surface. (remove all boundaries)
  3. Use the "Flatten Surf" C-Hook to flatten the surface onto a flat plane. Pay attention to U Curves and V Curves direction. You may need to swap them, depending on how the surface flattens.
  4. Next, convert the Wireframe Curves (I make a separate copy on a new level first), to "Surface Curves". (Use the Curve Surface command. Wireframe > Curves section > Dropdown > Curve Surface. This may work without creating Splines first, it has been years since I had to do this...)
  5. Once you have Surface Curves (not splines), you use the "Map.DLL" C-hook to map the surface curves from the "curved surface" to the "flattened surface".
  6. Finally, use the "Spline from Curves" command to turn the mapped curves back into splines.
  7. Now you can trim the flattened surface, to your mapped edge curves and internal boundaries (holes). You should probably "project" the mapped splines back onto the flattened surface, in order to have the "Trim surface to curves" command actually work.

Note that sometimes the results kick butt, other times not so much. You can also map points from the curved surface to the flattened surface. In times of trouble, I've mapped 100's of points down to the flattened surf, and just created new spline geometry from those mapped points.

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