Polyboard as it name suggests works mainly with flat sheet material.
Although limited to flat panels Polyboard has many features that enable you to give any shape to any specific panel in your project.
Any basic shape can be simply drawn in CAD as polylines and imported into Polyboard.
Shapes are of two sorts :
- open polylines that are for shaping the edges of a board
- closed polylines for making cut outs in the board.
Once imported into the Polyboard library the shape becomes parametric, and you can apply it to a board changing its proportions, angle and position. You can even mirror it horizontally or vertically.
Positioning the shape precisely on the board becomes very easy with Polyboard’s quick positioning features.
Here’s a quick video to show how to add basic shapes:
Adding Shaped Panels to your Polyboard project
To start the process, open a new cabinet. By selecting the board, we bring up its properties. We then go into the cutting list section where we find the edit feature, which lets us edit the structure. There are several different options in the structure menu: including edges tooling, angles tooling, inner tooling, and surface split. In this case, we’ll use edges tooling and inner tooling.
To change the shape of the edges, we go into edges tooling, and from there we can select the top, bottom, back or front and give each edge a shape. If we want to add a shape to the front, we click on the tooling box and bring up the menu. We can define whether we want an edging material applied as well as whether we want to add a shape. This shape can be a simple circle or a shape you have drawn in your CAD software. We then apply the shape to the board.
We can give the shape a specific width to re-proportion it. The shape can also be turned upside down or turned around, and we can specify that it goes inside or outside of the board. This can be done on all edges, and different edges can have different shapes.
The other possibility is to use the inner tooling functionality to cut out a shape. The inner tooling menu is similar to the edges tooling one, with different shapes you can apply. These again can be standard shapes or ones you have drawn. Even when you import a shape, you can resize it in Polyboard. You can define the shape’s position relative to the corners and edge of the board. We can again specify if it goes through the board or has a specific depth or recess.
By using inner and edges tooling, the boards can have practically any shape you want. It’s a great tool to simply and quickly custom design your furniture. It’s all parametric so if you change the height of the furniture, for example, the board will be re-dimensioned as you go. Polyboard also provides all the manufacturing tool parts, and cutting list.
For more videos on using shaped panels see these articles:
Design Furniture with free form shapes
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