For years, there’s been a great divide in the design industry. If you were a hard goods designer, making angular metal things, your path to testing fit and function might look like this:
Your favorite CAD system makes the shape, your CAM package generates G-code for your automatic CNC machine, and after some metal chips fly, you get a model you can measure, fit and validate. If you were a cutting-edge company, in the last few years your path may have a rapid prototype option as well:
However, if you are a designer of anything that could be called soft goods (things made of cloth, leather, foam, or even, oddly enough, carbon fiber composites), in days past your path to validation probably looked much longer:
And if you were trying to design a NEW shape, something that didn’t have an existing frame already built for it, now you had a fun, time-sucking iterative loop added to the middle of your process:
The iterative loop was necessary to remove sag or stretching in your new shape, to try different patterns over and over again, until you found one combination that bridged from your 3D to 2D design.
In the semi-modern age, some folks use technology to replace one of the manual steps, switching out the scissors for automated cutters that are similar to the CNC machines the hard goods guys have:
That took out some of the manual steps, but it still didn’t help much, since there still wasn’t a quick way to get a correct 2D flat pattern from the 3D shape. There was no equivalent of the integrated “CAM” packages used in hard goods. And now there is an extra step I don’t even have room to show (the asterisks), which is the making of a 2D DXF file that the cutter can read. At some of our customers, they start off with a 3D CAD file, do the manual lay up as shown, and then have to REDRAW the shapes in 2D for the cutter. Double the CAD work!
While there are spot solutions in the market for flattening and nesting, they are disconnected, creating a lot of waiting in the product development workflow as manufacturers must export files from one program to another. If changes need to be made, the entire process must be started again from the beginning. This decreases productivity and increases product development costs.
And this was the great divide.
Hard goods could easily be made and manufactured from CAD, but a lot of our customers
just left the soft goods out of their CAD designs entirely. What was the point of spending the time to draw them in 3D, when the manual process would break any association from the original file anyway?
But technology doesn’t ignore a pressing issue like this forever. Some really brilliant folks started working on the math problem of how to describe stretched, wrinkled, folded cloth shapes being translated to their 2D origins, and now we’ve got a SOLIDWORKS compatible answer:
Yes, that flat pattern is automatically generated from your 3D shape, right in your CAD system. And yes, that flat pattern can be sent right to your cutter as well. It saves so many steps that the picture seems empty by comparison! But in real life, it has saved companies up to 90% of their prototyping time, because the many manual iterations of cloth lay up can now be done in minutes by a computer.
It’s not magic, it’s an add-in for SOLIDWORKS called ExactFlat, and this month CAPINC will be hosting a webinar showing how it can speed up the validation of soft goods by integrating both your hard and soft goods product development workflow inside SOLIDWORKS.
ExactFlat can help anyone designing furniture, which is cloth over wooden frames:
Any of the soft goods in a car, which is leather over metal frames:
Any clothes or apparel, which is cloth over our organic skeletal frames:
And, in a market which surprised us, composites like carbon fiber used in boat hulls, wind turbine blades or high performance vehicles. Which at first glance seems more related to metal hard goods, but composites actually start their life as strips like cloth. And someone, somewhere, has to figure out how to cut the composite strips to lay up into your final 3D shape like this car mirror:
So if ANYONE at your company wants to speed up the prototype and validation process with soft goods, doing 10 to 100 times as many iterations in just minutes through FEA simulation, sign them up for the webinar below, where you can ask questions of the ExactFlat guys directly, to see how your company can achieve this workflow: