Developing Wires and Points

You can develop wires, and points, onto a revolution surface, that is to create a new wire by mapping a wire's planar abscissa and ordinate with abscissa and ordinate within a local axis-system on a surface, with respect to the surface's curvature. The wire can be any curve or sketch, provided it is a manifold element. Therefore it cannot be, for example, a T or H-shaped element.

Before you begin:

  • Ensure that you have the Developed Shapes product.

  • Create a 3D shape containing a surface.

Related Topics
More about the Develop Command
Selecting Using the Multi-Selection

  1. Click Develop in the Developed Shapes toolbar.

    The Develop Definition dialog box appears as well as the Tools Palette. For further information about the Tools Palette, refer to Infrastructure User's Guide : Selecting Using Selection Traps.



  2. In the Wire to develop box, select the wire(s) to be developed.

    When there are several wires to develop, the bag icon becomes available. You can click it to access the Elements to develop dialog box and remove or replace the selected wires.

    • By default, the plane containing this wire is automatically computed. If a wire to develop is replaced using the Replace button, the new wire must lie on the same plane as the wire to be replaced. If it lies on another plane, use the Remove button or clear the selection and select a new wire.
    • However, when the wire is a line, you need to specify a Wire plane.


  3. In the Support surface box, select the surface onto which the wire is to be developed.



    Important: If the support surface is a planar surface, only revolution surfaces are valid. Otherwise, an error message is issued.

  4. Click Preview.

    The axis-systems are displayed both on the wire's virtual plane and the surface. These are the default axis-systems. By default, the origin of the support's axis-system is located at a point on the surface where the plane is parallel to the wire's plane.

    However, it is usually more pertinent to specify exactly the axis-systems origin.



  5. Click the Point box and select a point, on the surface, defining the support axis-system's origin.

    The axis-systems are modified, the support's axis-system to coincide with the selected point, and the wire's axis-system to retain the shortest distance between the two axis-systems' origins.

    Consequently, the resulting wire is also modified.



  6. If you select the Position 2D wire check box then click Show Parameters to expand the dialog box and modify the wire axis-system's positioning.



    Important: The wire's axis-system turns green, meaning it can be edited, i.e. change location. You can directly move it in the geometry and the dialog box will be updated accordingly.

    • Specify the wire axis-system's origin by either entering coordinates, or selecting a point.
    • Specify the x-axis of the axis-system by either selecting a line or specifying a rotation angle in relation to the initial lowlight position.
    • Select the X-axis inverted check box to invert the x-axis orientation (while keeping the y-axis unchanged).
    • Select the Y-axis inverted check box to invert the x-axis orientation (while keeping the y-axis unchanged).
    You could get something like this:



    Important: If you want to go back to the initial axis-system positioning, clear the Position 2D wire check box and collapse the dialog box using the Hide parameters button.

  7. Click OK to create the developed wire.

    The element (identified as Develop.xxx) is added to the specification tree.



    Tip: You can then fill in the developed wire, to create a developed surface in one click (refer to Creating Fill Surfaces):