Sheetmetal Challenge

Let's see if a blog can get some discussion going.

We have recently been discussing sheetmetal capabilities and the conversion tool was brought up.

So I decided that it might be good to investigate how to make use of this tool.

The 1st advantage I saw was better corner control... or maybe more desirable options... which typically fail when making sheetmetal walls.

Then I tried to make the sheetmetal fold-out version of the 6 basic views by starting with a cube.  Here is where the fun begins.

Go ahead; start with a solid model of a cube and convert it to sheetmetal. 

See what you can do with this challenge and post what you learned.

BTW: I use this as the default view creation model rather than using template models.

Edit: Since the original post was a tease, I figured I would update the post with more information.

First of all, if you tried this, you might have noticed that a solid cube would simply flatten to the metal thickness when you define the sheetmetal conversion using the driven surface option, forcing you to use the shell option and loosing a complete wall.  This didn't set well with me so I used the technique in the video: create the cube using a thickened quilt.  Now the power of the conversion tool becomes apparent.  The conversion tool has two levels, which is not immediately apparent.  The rips can be treated individually and have a lot of power, many of which are particularly useful as it is difficult to re-create many of these when building a sheetmetal part from scratch.  Between the rips and corner relief's, both of which were deployed in the attached Creo 2.0 file, you have nearly no limitation with a little imagination.  The fact that you cannot create sketched rips inside the conversion tool had to be gotten around to divide the back wall down the middle.  I am not sure there was an option to accomplish this otherwise.  But the lesson learned here is that you must make a logical unfold part to get the corner relief's to work.  Again, corner reliefs are more controllable in this conversion feature than they are on their own or in wall/flange features.

The cube in the video is a bit more practical as you cannot form a closed cube.  The idea here is that this cube can be formed by hand (or at least with the use of a soft mallet). 

Feel free to play with the model and change parameters.  As always, use the information provided as you will.