First of all,

I'd like to thank Gerard for letting me run my own blog on CorelDRAW.com. I have been using CorelDRAW since version 7 and have been experimenting with implementing it in various uses besides just 2D illustration. I put together this small tutorial to show how to model something with CorelDRAW data in a 3D application using a slice and bend technique.

This is something I came up with a few years ago and I've not seen it documented anywhere else so I thought I'd share it with you. I use CorelDRAW and Lightwave in this tutorial.
Okay so,
First I drew a shape in CorelDRAW... Nothing fancy, about two hours worth of work.


Next,
I exported the CorelDraw file as an illustrator version 6... That format seems to work the best in Lightwave working this way. I then imported the AI version 6 file into Lightwave via the EPSF import. Lightwave used to have a limitation as to how many points a polygon could be made up of so I used the FINE setting. Now, in version 9 of Lightwave, that limitation is gone and it can be imported as SUPER FINE.

So,
Now that the shape is imported correctly into Lightwave, I extruded all of the shapes, beveled them and applied various surface properties to the individual shapes (Glass, metal/plastic, etc). It is important to note that booleans are used to cut out the holes in the shape. I also drafted the booleans within my shape in CorelDRAW so that I could accurately punch the shapes out that I needed to.
It looks something like this...


This is where it gets interesting though. Using the knife tool, I then uniformly and very tightly, sliced up the shape on all three axis. I used about three or four cuts on the thin Z side of the shape. It looked like this.


Now this is the fun part,
Now that the object is cut on all three axis... just bend it (using the bend tool) on the width and length sides. VIOLA! A pretty complex shape made in one day. Crazy?


Instead of making a complex spline cage and patching all of the nooks and crannies to make a mesh, I extruded and beveled my CorelDRAW object as a flat piece and then sliced it up to be an editable mesh.
  

The pros of this technique:
Only one... Super complex shape made real fast.

The cons of this technique:
Not perfectly accurate
The heavier the mesh polygon count the smoother the shape. It can be HEAVY before it looks good.

The strange thing about this is... Even though this is a Lightwave 3D render, It's composed entirely of CorelDRAW lines

This technique would work well for abstract Flash web graphics or perhaps a filler object to be filmed with a little bit of depth of field blur applied to hide some of the imperfections. I use this technique a lot. WORKS GREAT!
I hope you have enjoyed my slice and bend tutorial. If anyone knows of a similar tutorial on the web, please send a link my way, I'd love to see it.

Later!

Here is a link to my multi-media graphics blog