Flat of a rolled cylindrical part

[Alecia]

How can I make a part in Inventor which is a rolled sheet metal such that its flat pattern is linked and generated. I know this can be done possibly by using 2 folds of 180 degrees each (actually the second a little less than 180 deg to give a gap for butt-welding the longitudinal seam). But this is not all - I want to have cutouts in the cylinder at known places for pipe nozzles piercing through this cylinder. Moreover, one free edge of this cylinder is joggled in using roll forming, and near the other edge, a rolled bead is formed into this shell all around. The real challenge is that this be done all in sheet metal application so that a flat layout of the whole thing can be obtained. Can this be done and how?

Check out the "Project Flat Pattern" feature.
Although if your holes are large compared with the diameter of the rolled cylinder you may be better off creating the hole in the cylinder then creating the flat pattern.

[Alexavier]

You should first extrude or revolve a cylinder, then extrude cut your gap, by revolving less than 360 degrees. After the above bit is done, extrude cut your holes normal to the cylinder, and later switch to sheet metal application mode and highlight the inside surface of the cylinder and perform a sheet metal unfold (flat pattern) command. This will generate the ellipse for the hole cut outs etc. You can then save as a .dwg, make final tweaks in AutoCAD before exporting to a .dxf format for the burn table.

The problem is the joggle joint at the end. Not sure if there is a way to generate this directly from a rolled cylinder since would involve a bi-directional unfold. If you can determine a solution please post back. You may have to compensate for this material manually in AutoCAD by offsetting one edge.