Hi Thomas85,
it is easy to get good results when expansing nurbs surfaces, once one understands the underlying premises and the expansion procedure.
Let us not forget that even so called "developable" surfaces may be of the plastic deformation realm.
i personally have a lot of hands-on experience with developing nurbs surfaces with several thousand plates under my belt and never a "bad" one, and found that the one thing that people often overlook is the amount of curvature in the surface, especially perpendicularly to the plate's main direction.
In other words, people attempt unrealistic expansions by picking impossible surfaces or portions thereof, and forgetting that the material out of which these shapes will be made is not infinitely elastic, if at all.
So, picking the shape and plate's extent to be developed as a function of the surface's spacial curvature is the one way to ensure good results.
I started in the days back when the only method available was the highly imperfect shell expansion approach, requiring vast amounts of green material along the plate's edges. Moving on to nurbs and having understood the very basic principles of expanding nurbs, green material quickly became a distant memory.
I'll be very happy to share more if you would so like (my e-mail address is
ndar@ndar.com)
.
