Need LDPC help

[Jaco van der Molen]

Hi all,

Recently I dove into LDPC and need some help.
Questions I have:

1. Can I use primitives in patterns?
2. Can I select more then one primitive and copy/paste/duplicate them?
3. Can I group a primitives and triangles and copy/paste/duplicate them?
4. Can I use submodels in patterns?

For example, I am creating the pattern for the laserrelector sticker from set 10266.
It has a repetative pattern of dots.
I made one dot with disc primitives and filled the gaps with triangles.
Now I want to use that dot as many times as needed, create the rows and copy them.

Attached is my work so far.

Thanks.

[Johann Eisner]

Hi all,

Recently I dove into LDPC and need some help.
Questions I have:

1. Can I use primitives in patterns?
2. Can I select more then one primitive and copy/paste/duplicate them?
3. Can I group a primitives and triangles and copy/paste/duplicate them?
4. Can I use submodels in patterns?

For example, I am creating the pattern for the laserrelector sticker from set 10266.
It has a repetative pattern of dots.
I made one dot with disc primitives and filled the gaps with triangles.
Now I want to use that dot as many times as needed, create the rows and copy them.

Attached is my work so far.

Thanks.

1. Yes ( When using disc prim then always use a ndis prim to) 
2. No
3. I don't know 
4. Yes

[Philippe Hurbain]

1. Can I use primitives in patterns?
2. Can I select more then one primitive and copy/paste/duplicate them?
3. Can I group a primitives and triangles and copy/paste/duplicate them?
4. Can I use submodels in patterns?

1. Yes, though often it's not worth the trouble. Use primitives only if you can use matching primitives/negative primitives otherwise you'll have troubles with primitive substitution where primitives and soup of triangles meet. Here you should use a 1-4ring1 primitive for the lower right black ring (and you could possibly use a 3-4disc primitive instead of 3 x 1-4disc).
2. Unfortunately no, which makes this a mess to do. I'd probably use LDPE for that since it doesn't have this kind of restriction (LDPE also allows to make multiple translations/duplications at once which is very powerful here!
3. No you can't. once you select a primitive, all other selections are forgotten.
4. We are supposed to be able to do so (file -> import from dat -> append as subpart) but it doesn't seem to work exactly as I would expect (rotated subparts)... perhaps someone else has more experience with this?

[Jaco van der Molen]

OK, here is the plan:

   

To make a dot the green, blue, red and white 1-4disc prims are uses.
Yellow is 1-4ring1.
The other yellow thing is the ndis prim.

I'd like to make a sumodel for that (the dot) or is that a bit overdone?

Grey (for now) are just a bunch of triangles. I am unsure how to fill the gaps yet, but probably triangles and rectangles.

The corners are round so the sticker would have round egdes too.

[Jaco van der Molen]

1. Yes, though often it's not worth the trouble. Use primitives only if you can use matching primitives/negative primitives otherwise you'll have troubles with primitive substitution where primitives and soup of triangles meet. Here you should use a 1-4ring1 primitive for the lower right black ring (and you could possibly use a 3-4disc primitive instead of 3 x 1-4disc).
2. Unfortunately no, which makes this a mess to do. I'd probably use LDPE for that since it doesn't have this kind of restriction (LDPE also allows to make multiple translations/duplications at once which is very powerful here!
3. No you can't. once you select a primitive, all other selections are forgotten.
4. We are supposed to be able to do so (file -> import from dat -> append as subpart) but it doesn't seem to work exactly as I would expect (rotated subparts)... perhaps someone else has more experience with this?

Ah yes there is a 3-4disc too!

[Philippe Hurbain]

I'd like to make a sumodel for that (the dot) or is that a bit overdone?

Imho yes, it's overdone...

Grey (for now) are just a bunch of triangles. I am unsure how to fill the gaps yet, but probably triangles and rectangles.

LDPC knows only about triangles. But when exporting to dat, adjacent triangles are automatically converted to quads.

The corners are round so the sticker would have round egdes too.

BTW, using 1-4chrd instead of 1-4disc is better there (less vertices).

[Magnus Forsberg]

Did you find the Group/Ungroup buttons yet?

As Philo said, LDPC only knows triangles.
With Group/Ungroup it is easy to Copy "primitives" but only if you Ungroup the primitives first.

Select Primitive mode.
Select the primitive you want to split.
Click on Ungroup.

I have done this, and coloured every triangle in the ungrouped primitive. One colour for each uniqe primitive in my pattern.
When I'm satisfied with a section of the pattern, select every wanted triangle in the pattern, use Group, set the origin of that group, (I often use  the center of the sticker I'm working on, 0 , 0 ) and then it is possible to multiply the pattern by copying that group of triangles.

After an export it is possible to replace all triangles in a specific colour with the wanted primitive, if you want to do that.

I find the Group/Ungroup to be useful in this kind of repetitive patterns.

[Jaco van der Molen]

Did you find the Group/Ungroup buttons yet?

As Philo said, LDPC only knows triangles.
With Group/Ungroup it is easy to Copy "primitives" but only if you Ungroup the primitives first.

Select Primitive mode.
Select the primitive you want to split.
Click on Ungroup.

I have done this, and coloured every triangle in the ungrouped primitive. One colour for each uniqe primitive in my pattern.
When I'm satisfied with a section of the pattern, select every wanted triangle in the pattern, use Group, set the origin of that group, (I often use  the center of the sticker I'm working on, 0 , 0 ) and then it is possible to multiply the pattern by copying that group of triangles.

After an export it is possible to replace all triangles in a specific colour with the wanted primitive, if you want to do that.

I find the Group/Ungroup to be useful in this kind of repetitive patterns.

OK, so if you ungroup a primitive, it will "break" into triangles?
And triangles export to quads if possible.

Thanks for these tips too!

[Johann Eisner]

OK, so if you ungroup a primitive, it will "break" into triangles?

Yes, that's right.

[Jaco van der Molen]

So I have the pattern ready.
And I "borrowed" the thin box (0.25 LDU thick) with round corners from this part 4216816a.dat and modified it to fit a 2x2 area.
Now the BFC is not right, and I have no clue on how to fix that.
Can someone take a look? File is attached.
LMKWYT

[Johann Eisner]

So I have the pattern ready.
And I "borrowed" the thin box (0.25 LDU thick) with round corners from this part 4216816a.dat and modified it to fit a 2x2 area.
Now the BFC is not right, and I have no clue on how to fix that.
Can someone take a look? File is attached.
LMKWYT

Should now be BFC correct.
Rounded to 3 digits.