Leotard hips (awkwardly hacking dat-files)

[Jeroen Hoek]

For a MOC I am working on I have two minifig part variants which seem to be missing:

• Hips with red leotard (Bricklink 970c03pb10)
  
• Torso Bare Chest with Muscles Outline (Bricklink 973pb5732c01)
  

In the LDraw parts database I noticed that this hips-with-leotard variant does exist:

• Hips and Light Nougat Legs with Lime Leotard and Toes Pattern (Bricklink 970c90pb09)
  

So I figured I'd have a look to see if I can't just hack that one a bit with a text editor, and that actually worked:



What I did was remove foot front along with the coloured toes, and repair the hole with a yellow quad.

I made yellow a fixed colour, but used the variable 16 colour code for the leotard. This means that this will work for four plain leotard hips, as far as I can see:

• Hips and Yellow Legs with Light Aqua Leotard (Bricklink 970c03pb19)
  
• Hips and Yellow Legs with Red Leotard (Bricklink 970c03pb10)
  
• Hips and Yellow Legs with Black Leotard (Bricklink 970c03pb14)
  
• Hips and Yellow Legs with Green Leotard (Bricklink 970c03pb11)
  

There are more leotard bottoms, but those all seem to have additional details like spots or socks which is beyond my current skill level with LDraw files.

I've created dat-files for these four based on the Tinkerbell original by Evert-Jan Boer (@ejboer). Is someone willing to have a look at what I've made to see if these can be contributed back to LDraw? I'm a little out of my depth here with regards to the process and the required metadata for the files.

I've uploaded the files with their dependencies here. The files prefixed with jh in the parts-folder were added by me, the rest came along with the download for parts/73200bp01.dat. I've used the Bricklink ids to name those new files for now. Two other files are copies of the Tinkerbell pants, with the names kept the same except for the prefix.

For the second one — the torso variant — I am willing to draw that back and front and see I if I can get that working, but on the LDraw website I am missing something like a tutorial which outlines how you can get from a drawing to a working LDraw file. Am I right in assuming that it basically comes down to using flat coloured triangles and quads to approximate the decorations on any surface?

[Peter Grass]

Have a look at using img4dat
https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23242.html

It should help with converting the torso image to be triangles etc.

[Magnus Forsberg]

I made yellow a fixed colour, but used the variable 16 colour code for the leotard. 

This practise is not allowed in ldraw. The "print" must be fixed, and the "plastic" uncoloured.

[Jeroen Hoek]

Have a look at using img4dat
https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23242.html

It should help with converting the torso image to be triangles etc.

Thank you, that is a useful suggestion.

[Jeroen Hoek]

I had a look at the torso (Bricklink) I wanted to decorate and wrote a few small Python scripts to convert SVG's made with Inkscape into some type 3 and 4 lines. This seems to work OK for me (I'm used to working with Inkscape). For torsos the front and back are vertical, so the Z is fixed at -10 and 10, making this approach feasible.



I've used the LDraw colour specification to generate a colour palette for Inkscape (limited to the basic types of colours). My script turns these into the LDraw colour codes. This is a crude script: it expects the author of the SVG to keep all paths at the root level, and you have to draw the triangles and trapeziums yourself, in the right point order.



The resulting torso LDraw file is this. The combined torso with arms (973pb5732c01) seems to have the arms and hands with a fixed yellow, while the bare torso is variable. I'm not sure about the detail colour being right; this is medium nougat. It looks the same as the actual piece though.

This seems to work, in that I can import these parts using PartDesigner and export them to Studio, but that leaves me with hips and torso without any predefined hinge points. Is there a way to use these in Studio with the same hinge and connection points as other hips and torsos?

Also, in the Page Design for the Instruction maker in Studio the arms and legs l
ook translucent (left is an existing piece):



This persists when exporting the instruction pages.

[Peter Grass]

There is a bug in studio causing things to be transparent that shouldn't be in the instructions. Nothing to do with what you made. The devs of that app are aware of the issue and will probably fix it in the next update. You would have to revert to a version from 2 updates ago if you want it working now.