Pardon me if this has been asked before, but I’m looking for an extension (or workaround) that can take a tensile material and lay it flat in order to get accurate, practical shapes and measurements for building.
For example, imagine a standard tent frame; drape a tensile fabric over the top of it. Now, imagine taking the frame away and laying the remaining tensile fabric flat on the ground in order to get the area and shapes it would take to sew that actual fabric together to get that shape of tent. (Can you tell I make tents for a living?)
Is this something that is possible to do in Sketchup?
I drew a rectangle using the rectangle tool. I then used push/pull to make a box. I then used the line tool, drew a line from a bottom corner to the mid-point on the top, front face. I used the push-pull tool and extruded to the end. I did the same thing on the other side and it resembled a pup tent. I then used the scale tool and flattened it out to ground level and saved it. Now if you use the scale tool, you can pull it up back into a tent shape. Here’s the skp file. Tent.skp (12.0 KB)