I've been playing with Autodesk's 123D Make. I drew this Porsche 356 and then sliced it in 123D Make. I'm going to be making some new work this summer that uses this program to make a wood buck to check the fitment of aluminum sheetmetal panels that I weld together to make the final shape of my sheetmetal object. I had introduced my students to this free program this past semester, but hadn't had a lot of time to play with it myself. You can see above that the software allows you to take any obj/stl file and slice it into interlocking, stacked, or radial planer forms. You can spec out your material thickness and also tell it what size your sheet goods will be that you will cut the planer sections from. In this case my sheets were 16" x 12" for cutting on our laser cutter, but you could make it whatever you want. You can decide on how many planer sections you want in the x and y and you can move those planes around if you want more density in a certain area of the form. It generates a nested layout of all of the planer sections that you can export as a vector based pdf, eps or dxf. You can also save the assembled planer sections as an stl if you want to import this into another modeling program to pull curves from or edit. This is a great way to fabricate a quick 3d model of something and I think it is going to work great for making full scale wooden forming bucks for metal shaping. Combine this with a large CNC router, CNC plasma cutter, or waterjet and you could make some large forms.
