Spline Loft Sculpture

I've got a new set of splines to play with and the scale factor is 2.25 now.
In the first go round I copied and pasted an inner folder which put everything off to the side.
I should have copied the file, deleted what I didn't need, and worked with drag and drop to avoid the problem.

I'm going to start with the offset splines in a folder that's at world center.
The first thing I'll do is drag the folder over until it's approximately centered.

foldermove.gif
 
When I select all Splines in the Object Browser, and drag them
out of the folder, the scale factor of the Folder is inherited by all splines.

dragout.gif
 
The splines are positioned in various ways, some rotated 90
degrees some -90, and the pivot points are all over the place.

Plus the 2.25 unidirectional scaling is still there in each one and need to be "burned" to 1x1x1.

Now I'll unify them all in rapid sequence with the Burn Transform command and down arrow key.
This will burn the scale and move all pivot points to World Center.

burntransform.gif
 
For this part I made a YouTube video to show how easy it is to make objects like these.
I used a custom window layout so don't bother looking for it, you'll have to build it yourself.

Cheetah is very customizable.

My OS does not support Dark Mode so I customized some Cheetah 3D
colors because a dark background looks good with splines.

 
Don't beat yourself up, you've gotten very far with no 3D modeling experience.
You have the proper attitude to handle the frustration this art form can create.
 
I realize the title of this thread is wrong now with no Loft Modifier being used.

Regardless of that fact, the ultimate goal is to
produce PDFs with uvs to guide a laser cutter.

The usual ways of unwrapping uvs are fine for mapping
graphics to an object but for laser cutting, not so much.

I have been testing some new techniques using
a process of Pinning points in the uv editor.

With the first low poly element completed, it's obvious
we are talking about a 1 to 1 polygon to uv situation.

So each polygon is unwrapped separately and pinned to
the previous one, keeping their relative scale the same. 🤞

Element 1.jpg
 
Great, the whole scuplture should be 291cm in lenght. I will be interesting how many hdf plates I will need. The dimensions of the working area of laser cutters are different, long time ago I had the opportunity to use one with a working area of 80x60cm, this dimension are ok for transporting.

When I have all the pdfs I have to search for an laser cutting service, I think there will be huge differences in cost...
 
I unwrapped and pinned all uvs for element 1, pinned points are yellow.
I'll email you the PDF and Cheetah file.

Element 1 Pinned 02.jpg
 
Thanks a lot, but if I move the right element over the left it does not fit, the lengh is different, which is right because it is not symmetrical how it gets bigger. I supposed the quadrat/square elements gets bigger and smaller on a straight line/axis, so to top and bottom should be not in different angles, was the mistake already done in the original illustrator files? 🥶

edit: I check my illustrator file, the square are real squares... hmm
 

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I see the same thing in Affinity Designer.
That's disappointing, at this point It look like this won't work. 😭
 
If you trust one element it´s easy to snap points from the other one over to the one trusted. If it´s symmetrical cut just a half of the items but 2 times.
 
😭 But how can cheetah make something that is symmetrical in the 3D view to something non symmetrical? Dont get it, is this a bug?
 
Just a quick test and it´s precisely as it can gets. Maybe make sure the "Attraction radius" is set to 0,0 at the Symmetry modifier/Creator:
SymmetryUVstest.gif
 
After adjusting my procedure to include Franks suggestions, symmetry, unwrapping
with ABF plus pinning the long edges when possible seems to work well.

I was worried about the places that I had to pin to the short edges. I feared it might
not be as accurate, as I have had problems with that before for some reason.

I have been thinking of ways I can check the length of each edge for comparison.

The first idea was to do it in Affinity Designer but I have hardly used
that program and I couldn't find a simple measurement tool. 😕

Next I thought of printing it out, but my printers are derelict at this point.

So instead I exported the PDF as an SVG and opened
it with Cheetah so I could use Cheetah's ruler tool.

So far the measurements are exactly the same. 🥳

Here's the new UV layout.

New UV layout.jpg
 
I just realized I can open the PDF with Cheetah, which makes it one spline.
This is much easier to measure than the many separate splines of an SVG. 💡
 
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