Sheet fabrication, whether in metal or plywood, is one of the core fabrication techniques that accounts for more than 90% of all the tasks in our shop for example. The typical workflow consists of modeling the part and exporting the sketch to cut the part using a CNC router, waterjet, or CNC plasma cutter.
The problem arises when part needs to be bent, especially if the bends are not parallel or if they’re curved like when using plywood. The process when the model is manually unfolded to a plane is very time consuming and prone to human errors, which leads to material waste, increased times of fabrication and raise in overall costs.
A feature that automagically unfolds the model to a plane and creates a sketch, is a must have for us and would cut our costs by 40% on average.