2 Patterned Tiles

[Orion Pobursky]

Anyone up for these 2:
https://rebrickable.com/parts/2431pr0008...els-print/
https://rebrickable.com/parts/4162pr0066...sco-print/

Can provide scan if needed.

[Philippe Hurbain]

Anyone up for these 2:
https://rebrickable.com/parts/2431pr0008...els-print/
https://rebrickable.com/parts/4162pr0066...sco-print/

Can provide scan if needed.

Can do, if nobody else wants to do them.

[Philippe Hurbain]

Anyone up for these 2:
https://rebrickable.com/parts/2431pr0008...els-print/
https://rebrickable.com/parts/4162pr0066...sco-print/

Can provide scan if needed.

Can do, if nobody else wants to do them.

Frisco tile done http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg...162p1a.dat
Edit: Solar panel too: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg...431p70.dat

[Orion Pobursky]

Can do, if nobody else wants to do them.

Frisco tile done http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg...162p1a.dat
Edit: Solar panel too: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg...431p70.dat

You rock. Thanks. Are there typeface primitives for the Architecture tiles? If so, I can do this myself in the future.

[Philippe Hurbain]

You rock. Thanks. Are there typeface primitives for the Architecture tiles? If so, I can do this myself in the future.

No there are none. But I have some doubts concerning usefulness. txt2dat works fine and allows kerning, something impossible with predefined boxed primitives.

[Orion Pobursky]

You rock. Thanks. Are there typeface primitives for the Architecture tiles? If so, I can do this myself in the future.

No there are none. But I have some doubts concerning usefulness. txt2dat works fine and allows kerning, something impossible with predefined boxed primitives.

What’s the font again?

[Philippe Hurbain]

What’s the font again?

Here I used plain old Arial... Myriad Web Pro is not bad either.

[Chris Dee]

You rock. Thanks. Are there typeface primitives for the Architecture tiles? If so, I can do this myself in the future.

No there are none. But I have some doubts concerning usefulness. txt2dat works fine and allows kerning, something impossible with predefined boxed primitives.

Good point regarding kerning. Do you think the Swiss721BT primitives are overkill? Would it be better (although WET, not DRY *) to inline, as been done with text representations many times elsewhere?

* WET vs. DRY

[Philippe Hurbain]

Good point regarding kerning. Do you think the Swiss721BT primitives are overkill? Would it be better (although WET, not DRY *) to inline, as been done with text representations many times elsewhere?

* WET vs. DRY

For me yes, they are overkill. Considering the gazillon of available fonts, it's often easier to use a similar font, generate the text with txt2dat and if needed tweak a few letter shapes to better match the font used by LEGO (and even if the font was available as primitives, tweaking it implies inlining...)

[Ulrich Röder]

Good point regarding kerning. Do you think the Swiss721BT primitives are overkill? Would it be better (although WET, not DRY *) to inline, as been done with text representations many times elsewhere?

* WET vs. DRY

For me yes, they are overkill. Considering the gazillon of available fonts, it's often easier to use a similar font, generate the text with txt2dat and if needed tweak a few letter shapes to better match the font used by LEGO (and even if the font was available as primitives, tweaking it implies inlining...)

It's not Ariel or Myriad .... I hope you do not mind, Phillip

The font for this part is again Swiss BT 721 .... but not "bold" .... in that case it is "normal".

...fits 100%

A real proof that this font has been in use since the gray 12v era until today at Lego.

Perhaps the trade off should be to introduce only very commonly used fonts as primitives.
... makes sense anyway in frequent occurrences .. otherwise Phillip, of course you have legitimate good arguments.

[Chris Dee]

For me yes, they are overkill. Considering the gazillon of available fonts, it's often easier to use a similar font, generate the text with txt2dat and if needed tweak a few letter shapes to better match the font used by LEGO (and even if the font was available as primitives, tweaking it implies inlining...)

It's not Ariel or Myriad .... I hope you do not mind, Phillip

The font for this part is again Swiss BT 721 .... but not "bold" .... in that case it is "normal".

...fits 100%

A real proof that this font has been in use since the gray 12v era until today at Lego.

Perhaps the trade off should be to introduce only very commonly used fonts as primitives.
... makes sense anyway in frequent occurrences .. otherwise Phillip, of course you have legitimate good arguments.

I've not created many textual patterned parts myself, but I'd like to understand the relative development effort and rendering efficiency between a) building the text string with txt2dat and tweaking if necessary, versus b) scaling and combining individual character primitives.

Thanks,

[Magnus Forsberg]

... I'd like to understand the relative development effort and rendering efficiency between a) building the text string with txt2dat and tweaking if necessary, versus b) scaling and combining individual character primitives.

I would say that the difference is not that great.
The difficulty lays in finding the correct, and free of charge, font, downloading it and tweeking the settings in txt2dat.
Once you have a good set of low enough resolution letters in a file, I import it into LPC and scale and resize it to fit the text in the sticker I'm working on. I tend to remove the four corners from the txt2dat file, and reuse/reshape the rest, to minimize the vertices. 

For sure, having a character primitive might speed things up, but only if it was already created. And then I would have to inline them to simplify the mesh, removing unnecessary vertices. The benefit of using txt2dat is that the triangulation between the letters is already done. Using inlined character prims might force a complete recreation of the background surface. OTOH sometimes you want a vertex between (or above and below) the letters to avoid thin, long triangles. But that is easy to add in LPC.