Panel design

Within PolyBoard the Structures Menu and its commands offer a powerful set of panel design features to add flexibility to your projects.

They include a variety of tooling and cut out functions, adding bar materials and frameworks, creating sandwich panels and splitting individual panels into multiple materials and types.

Edges tooling

How to add a shape to the edge of a panel in PolyBoard.

This can be used to create handle cut outs, curved surfaces and other design enhancements.

Angles tooling

How to add a shape to the corner of a panel in PolyBoard.

This feature is useful if for example you would like to create a curved corner to a worktop.

As well as appearing in the plans, the machining of the applied shape will be available in the CNC file for automatic machining.

Inner tooling

How to cut out a holes in your panels for cutting and machining.

You can create cut throughs, pockets and inlays very easily with this parametric feature, and import your own shapes as DXF files if you wish.

Surface split

How to split a panel into multiple panels.

Once you’ve done this, you can add slack between each of them, add a shape to their edge, rotate them, apply hardware and change materials individually.

This gives a lot of extra design flexibility for your projects.

Surface split: edit individual panels

More features of the Surface Split command, used to divide a single panel into multiple panels.

This video shows you how to edit each panel independently, which is particularly useful if you want to move and resize them separately, and for extra flexibility in your design.

Thickness split

How to split a panel’s thickness into multiple panels.

This is mainly used for veneered doors and other panels where you have a core material and also a decorative outer material and on other side a balancing veneer to stop warping.

All materials are included in the cut list output.

Assembly

How to create a frame and panel assembly.

You can use bar or panel materials for the framework, you can add additional rails, apply shapes to the frame, change materials independently for each structural element and lots more.

You can also apply additional configurations from the structures menu one on top of the other.

This video shows one example of that, adding a second frame assembly inside the first.

Copy and paste a structure

Two ways to copy your panel structures across to a new panel.

You can do this with any of the structures: Surface Split, Thickness Split or Inner Tooling for example.

Here we copy a frame and panel assembly.

Panel structures library management

How to add your own structures (frame and panel assemblies, toolings, Surface and Thickness Split etc) to the Panel Structures Library.

You can then easily apply these to new projects, or use the ones we’ve already set up for you.

Simulate a shaker style frame with the structures menu

You can use bar materials to create a true frame assembly.

This alternative method uses PolyBoard’s thickness split and inner tooling features to create a cut out from a panel.