Sheet metal, further development: ROLL? Flatten?

[Anonymous]

Very happy to see sheet metal in Fusion and the functionality so far is great BUT I have a few, perhaps strange, uses that might be worth looking into developing for sheet metal in the future. One is ROLL... there are many sheet metal projects/ structures that use a rolled form rather than folded. I'm talking about cylinders, cones and the like. There are many programs available to create and deconstruct conical shapes for sheet outside of Fusion but it would be nice to have everything under one roof? Thoughts?

In the same vein, there are processes like hydroforming which inflate a material to the finished shape. It would be great to be able to reverse the process, say starting with a final shape and flattening it... perhaps 'flatten' is not the right term here. Compress? Squash? Anyway you get the idea. It's neither unfold nor unroll.

I thought I would put this out here and see if anyone else could use features like this? I have work-arounds using various formats to reach my final result but the "all under one roof" idea is really appealing.

Thoughts?

[peterpopeszku]

Excellent idea!

[Rob_Lockwood]

for the hydroforming, have you looked at ExactFlat? It's not entirely integrated, but there is pretty nice interaction between fusion and exactflat through an add-on. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses & kudos- hopefully someone at Autodesk sees this and takes note that these pragmatic features would be put to use! In the meantime I'll have a look at ExactFlat... Also curious if anyone has seen a similar feature for calculating flat cut shapes for Carbon fiber constructed forms? 

[Anonymous]

Had a look at Exact Flat and while it looks like a good product the features I describe are fairly basic which should be included in any sheet metal workflow that the Fusion team develops.

[TravisJoe]

I know that stamped and other non-uniform forming operations like hydro-forming can be complex. 

I will say that rolls and other developable surfaces would be awesome to have and probably a good first step. A similar-ish feature would be step braking of sheetmetal parts (multiple bends to form curved surfaces). 

[threadbuilt]

It would be nice to see improved control or options for cylindrical objects as well. Having to create a flat tab whilst might be technically necessary is limiting from a design perspective as the sheet metal environment could be used for other functions ie applying a pattern on a ring parametrically...

[Anonymous]

One of the most basic/common tools you'll see in any sheet metal shop is a roll or slip-roll. So many sheet fabrications require rolling- certainly it should be on the short list of improvements for SHEET METAL if fusion is to be a serious contender for people doing this sort of work. 

[Anonymous]

Regarding control and expanding the parametric design environment- once features like flatten and unroll are implemented the next logical step would be to work in some shortcuts for standard details used often like tabs, keys and such.

[cooilmailster]

This sort of function is exactly what I need.  I have tried a few ways to coerce Fusion into it but it just won't have it

[nicola.j.d.a]

Great idea. Facing a similar problem right now by trying to translate a 3 dimensional rendering of a car body part into a 2mm thick aluminum sheet. Since I work as a sculptor I can accept quite a lot of translation of appearance and shape. Therefore, I have been considering translating the rendering via Exactflat into a flat drawing and then approximate that via the sheet metal function in Fusion 360. Has anyone experience with a workflow like this?
Otherwise, I would be very curious to hear about other workflows via hydroforming. What is the steps from Fusion to the final shape?

[TravisJoe]

Hydroformed and stamped parts are a different world compared to developable sheetmetal. The complexity of calculating and dealing with stamped and hyrdoformed parts is far behind that of typical sheetmetal tools.

If this is what you need I would suggest starting another idea for stamped and hydroformed manufacturing tools. 

[Anonymous]

For clarity, the shapes discussed are cones, cylinders and the like. These are simple enough to plot patterns for rolling and hydroforming using pen & paper. I can't imagine adding a 'flatten' or 'unroll' feature would be too difficult (it's actually possible to do already with some complicated work-arounds) to add and see if it is worth developing further? This was my idea, we see a lot of people have read this post, so obviously there is some desire for it.