Solidworks to developed panels

Hey this is my first post here. I am an engineer and I have tons of Solidworks experience. I designed a flats fishing boat in solidworks and I would like to build it stitch and glue. I have looked at several of the free hull design programs that will allow the user to develop flat panels but I cant find a way to import a file from Solidworks. I tried to build the boat as a sheet metal part in Solidworks but I couldn't get the panels to twist like I wanted them to. Solidworks can export to a whole bunch of different file formats. Step, iges etc. Does anyone know of a hull program that can import any 3d files that Solidworks can export? Or any other ideas?

Thanks!

 

larbhills, do your job with surfaces (not solids), export to rhino, then develop there.

 

Are you sure that sw produces developable surfaces ? If so, you could export via iges or stp to rhino and unroll the surfaces. But be careful - even if rhinos gaussian curvature analysis shows complete green results ( fully devolopable ) we had surfaces that were not buildable. Better to use special software for that, or rhinolabs ruling lines technique.

 

Entire surface green for Guassian curvature in CurvatureAnalysis does not necessarially mean the surface is "fully developable". Set the limits large enough and any surface will be all green.

Whether a surface is close enough to an ideal developable surface to be buildable depends on the material and fabrication methods.

 

I dont want to be obvious but as you allready know, no matter what software you use, surfaces will be developable if they have curvature in just one direction. That includes linear extusions of splines in any direction, conical extrusions of ellipses, conical surfaces and off course cylinders.
That said, from a theoretical point of view, any kind of surface can be developed, no matter how complex it is, if you reduce it to triangles little enough. In fact, that's what all 3D softwares do: towsends, millons of little triangles. In real life, this is not so simple.
Now, going to practice, some non-developable surfaces can be developed with good enough accuracy (you define what's "good enough") if you can reduce curvature in one of the two directions. A simple practice for that is just add new hardchines dividing your surface as segments of an orange. Solidworks can't develop non-developable surfaces when they have a little amount of double-curvature. But Rhino can do it, and results are pretty good if your surface has a very low curvature in one of the two directions.

 

From a theoretical point of view, any kind of surface can be approximated to any degree of accuracy if you reduce it to triangles little enough. But the triangles will not necessarially fit together to form a single flat surface without gaps. Closing the gaps requires stretching/shrinking and/or shearing, which don't occur with a developable surface. So it is not true that any surface can be developed. It is true that any surface can be "flattened" with sufficient stretching/shrinking and/or shearing,.

In theory the UnrollSrf command in Rhino doesn't flatten non-developable surfaces, but sometimes it does fi the deviation from a developable surface is not too large. In those cases it introduces some stretching/shrinking and/or shearing of the surface. The difference in area of the unrolled surface from the original surface is reported in the command history area.

For control of how a non-developable surface is flattened use the Squish command.

 

I got a trial version of Rino and it worked fine. My design is hard chined and I lofted surfaces. Rino made developed panels on the first try.

Thanks for the advise!