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eman_not_ava
Participant
March 24, 2020
Question

Tips for Line drawings when working with material thickness

  • March 24, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 484 views

So at my work I need to make line drawings that are used in our ZUND cutting machine,

A material I frequently work with is Dibond(3mm Thick) also known as AluPanel.

 

Let's say our customer wants a Dibond panel of 1450 mm wide on side of a pillar

and 1200 mm wide on the other side, we'd need to engrave a Dibond panel at the point where

these 2 sides of the pillar meet.

Now comes the tricky part: Engraving makes it possible to bend the Dibond panel 45 degrees

but because it's engraving, the Dibond panel loses 3mm because it goes into each other.

 

This means that in order to get the exact width that our customer told us to make,

we always need to add +3mm to it(or 6mm if it's engraved on both sides)

 

So my question is this:

Is there some kind of tool or plugin for illustrator to make working with material thickness easier?

If necessary I don't mind buying a program from AutoDesk to design these walls and then export them

to Illustrator, but there's so many programs that I don't know which I should be using.

 

Using Adobe Illustrator CC 2020(Got access to CC 2019 as well)

 

Any help is appreciated,

Anthony Langendoen

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Disposition_Dev
Legend
March 26, 2020

Can you share an example file? What exactly needs to change? 

Mylenium
Legend
March 24, 2020

CAD programs ahve unwrap functions for all sorts of geometry but that seems overkill. If the angle and the distance is known, warping any paths should not be difficult to calculate based on a simple cosine function, give or take some additional stretching due to the materials own elasticity. The multiplier is something like 0.707 if I'm not mistaken or its inverse (1.41) depending on whether it contracts or expands. Not much different than iso drawing and in fact it could easily be packed into a similar action using scale, shear and rotation if necessary.

 

Mylenium

eman_not_ava
Participant
March 25, 2020

Thanks for your reply,

But whilst I can do the calculating, it quite often happens that right in the middle of making everything,

Our customer walks in and adds a bunch of things to the order or changes what size X panel needs to be.

 

Continuously changing this whilst keeping the material thickness in mind is just super confusing,

the more changes he requests the more fault senstive everything becomes(it's also a pain in the neck).

I got tired of it and made this post in the hope someone knows a tool to help automate this stuff