(2026-09-10, 21:03)Iris Wrote: Hello! I've recently taken my first steps into the world of part authoring and would like to know the general guidelines for cleaning up parts exported from the Lego Instructions app. For context I'm currently working on part 8094 which has a lot of curved/circular parts as well as a fairly complex front profile, and I've been wondering on the best ways to approach a few things:These are mostly just the questions off the top of my head, so if there are other things I should know please feel free to tell me
- I'm assuming it's a good idea to replace 24-sided circles with 16-sided circles/primitives, is that correct?
- Should I be attempting to make pairs of triangles coplanar so they can become quads?
- If I can't exactly reproduce a circle (like one with a radius of 10.532) is rounding it to 10.5 fine as an approximation?
Hello Iris,
Welcome to parts authoring! It's great to see new authors joining!
You can finde parts from the Instructions App also in the "Raw Meshes" thread in this forum.
no let's see 8094, a neckwear.
The best approach is to take a similar part form the "Neckwear Category" to see simplifications done. The mesh is pretty fine around the neck, too fine.
https://library.ldraw.org/parts/list?tableFilters[category][values][0]=Minifig+Neckwear&tableFilters[my_votes][isActive]=false&tableFilters[parent_ready_for_admin][isActive]=false
It shoudl fit a head/Torso combo like this:
1 9 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 973.dat
1 9 0 -26 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3626.dat
- Split the part in half
- you can take over the outside basically "as is"
- the inner faces intersect with the 3626 head that needs to be corrected -> use LDPE's Move to nearest face or edge function
- make the neck-hole 16-sided
- reduce complexity there, the original part is roundes/soft there you can reduce the curve there make it more edges
- You can keep also the outside of the neck at the back
- forcing quads is not always good, if it does not work out keep it two triangles
br
Gerald