Hi! I’m pretty new to Sketchup, a teacher at our school gave us a house model from SketchUp and we have to take it by laser cutting, I was separating the pieces manually but I have a problem with the curved facade since I have no idea of how to make the surface a ¨plane¨ that I can then take to AutoCad to laser cut. Any help will be very appreciated, thanks in advance!
Ultimo2 (1).skp (1.5 MB)
Personally I would get the length of the curve by selecting it and reading it from entity info, and the height the same way, then you have the dimensions of a rectangle.
Draw the rectangle and array the ‘diamonds’ on it.
1 Like
Melnikov house?
I do paper volumes art. and I use SU to unfold stuff.
Box’s solution is good here since it’s a cylinder, and unfolding your model would give you a prism.
However, my solution can work in general, cylinders or other shapes.
In the extension warehouse, on the main page, there is an extension named unwrap and flatten faces.
So, let’s take a look at your file. First, isolate the shape you want to laser cut.
Then, if it’s symetrical, or if it repeats (pattern), isolate one part of it. After all, if it repeats, no need to treat it all.
Here, I only kept half of it. Technically I could have kept half of this half, but eh, past me was lazy.
I’ve turned on its back.
I tried the plugin at this point, but it had difficulties with some super thin parts.
these things have to go. You can see it in the model, they have been manually smoothed, it’s simply the rythm of the windows not falling perfectly in line with the faces of the cylinder. As you plan on laser cutting it, then rolling it, and it’s a model, you can cheat. I’m talking 3mm in real scale, so in your model, it’ll be… the kerf of your laser.
Once I’ve slightly cheated so the problematic windows don’t cause problem anymore, I can use the extension. select all faces, right click, and unwrap. you might have to do it a few times, each try is random. also, fewer faces make it easier.
I did a couple tries, and got this. one face missing, it won’t kill me.
Simple redraw the missing part if needed. and here you go, half of you wall. feel free to duplicate and extend it.
off course, at this point, you could get rid of the fold lines. since you’re going to roll it after lascutting 
voila.skp (1,8 Mo)
in another thread, we discussed the variation between a 24 circle and an actual circle, and it’s quite small. Having done a lot of models in architecture school, I’m pretty sure I would use this result, cut it and gently roll it into a cylinder, in a scale model, with a thin material, the result would be really close from an actual cylinder (even though it started as a prism). Off course, if I had to do it from scratch, I would start with a 48 or 96 sided wall.
Your model states that the wall has a length of 23,091m
my unwrap gives me 23,070m, so 2,1 cm mistake.
In a 1:50 model, it becomes less than half a mm. it’s a glueing error 
finally, other solution would be to use softwares like pepakura (pc) or unfolder (mac)
The do pretty much the same thing, but not at random. you have full control of how it unfolds, you can sclice your model on several sheets, with or without tabs etc.