I am trying to design panels that will be cut from steel sheets, roller bent, and welded to make a hemisphere (roughly).
I have more-or-less designed the panel (I need to review it and confirm), but am having trouble verifying my design by building it into a dome. I am looking for help on my next steps, or how to draft my dome such that I can generate a flat panel design to generate the cut pattern for the sheet metal.
I have tried the sheetmetal tools, creating a flange from my panel design and then bending it with the radius (bend override) that I want. This seems to change the shape of the panel and when I pattern it in a circle to make a dome, they overlap. I suppose my panel design could be wrong but I am pretty sure the flange command changes the shape of the panel. Maybe because it flanges between two edges and cuts away everything in between. When I view my sheet metal design flat, the panel shape is clearly altered. It also seems to double my dome radius (and therefore double the needed panels) but that should be a tweakable fix.
I suppose this is probably doable with sculpting? Although I do not know where I would start with that as I am not a strong sculptor (advice appreciated here if this seems like the easiest solution).
The panel was designed by splitting the Dome cross section into courses, and determining the radius at each course. I suppose another approach would be to draw and arc, and rectangles along the path at the arc along the defined courses of different radii, and loft between each rectangle.... I dunno.
Thanks for any help! Jeff
