Ability to flatten out objects

[cadkiller]

Group;

A friend of mine modeled this custom railing using Rhino.
He then was able to flatten out the rail panels and export via DXF to a water jet machine.
Would be nice if revit could do the same. I think many design build type companies would like this feature.

[sbrown]

I think you could do this right now, you can export to dxf allready, so just create your railing panels, then measure the length of the stair railing(edit the rail sketch and use the arc length dimension to figure out its overall length, then draw a new straight railing that length and export.

[cadkiller]

Scott;

The stair railing is elliptical in shape and has various sloped conditions. I would have to construct all of these conditions manually. Rhino did it for him automatically from what I was told and has a flatten command built into the program.

[sbrown]

Sounds cool. From the image it looks like all the panels are the same size and wouldn't be too hard to create in revit. I typically construct ellipse forms out of 4 arcs so that I can dimension them, I guess it would be difficult to get the arc length of a true ellipse.