pattern coordination and optimization efforts

[Victor Di Rienzo]

Guys as you know there are several missing patterns, to coordinate the effort and make it more useful the work we do.


I noticed that when you look a brick like 3010 on rebricable it says the amount of sets that its being used with its pattern. As an example, Some patterns are used in 1set other like in 10

So i was thinking in asking them to send us a list of the most used bricks with patterns and if they are listed or not at ldraw .

Benefits.
1 we will know which bricks patterns are missing
2 we will be willing on the most used patterns and not on a single brick that was only used at 1980 in 1 set.
3 save time will looking what to draw and dont re make a pattern that was all ready on the ldraw gallery.

This can be done by hand but it's a hard work, as rebricable or otger sites has this information on their db may be easy for them to send us the list.

This also can be extended for the bricks minifgs, 3d objects that are not yet available at ldraw.



File example
Brick number; amount of set, ldraw available?,brick descrption, url on the site.... Etc

Probably some of you may know the owners of those sites they may be able to help.

[Gerald Lasser]

Yes, there are billions of patterns missing...  

I once took the task to complete (at that time) all the 98138 (Tile Round 1 x 1) and added close to 50 patterns. Counted them today, and there are already nearly 20 missing!

I had a spree with the 4x4 Dishes and 3x3 Dishes this week. Due to a cleanup of the main file to close mini-gaps and the move to 48 sections on the 3x3, I made the LDPC templates and added what I had in my collection (2 complicated ones to go for the 4 x 4)

It gets crazy with Minifig heads... The Company releases around 250 per annum (counting on Bricklink) I do have a XLS somewhere with a status form last year and I think there were some 2500 different heads... I took pictures of the ones I have, around 400, but I managed to add also around 50 only, mostly CMF and some Star Wars.

Torsi, same thing...

You need those times when you get an urge to do those...

I am not sure of the number of times a pattern is used in real life is meaningful, may be people want different, rarer patterns.

Of course a repository of very good pictures/photographs would be essential to start doing those en masse (plus time  )

May be data can also be extracted through the XML/CSV download option of the BL database.

May be a priority would also be "hot" sets, like some Idea-Sets etc...

[Vincent Messenet]

Indeed completing missing patterns is a Herculean task! 

These last days I spent some time on part 3070b (Tile 1 x 1) as Gerald did with 98138 (Tile Round 1 x 1)

So far if I'm not wrong there are 15 remainings but keeping up-to-date is very hard compared to the number of new patterned parts being released each year.

The complex task sometimes is also finding good quality pictures, for example, I do not find a good one for this part: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=149890#T=C&C=110

For the priority I agree with Gerald it is not necessarily the number of sets using the part which defines the priority but rather people needs.

On my side, I started a few months ago to share photos of my own parts on a shared drive folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1ukmHGrXcmFzgIb6RpYSti5GJZUyqZOGe
I still need to add more of them but also to remove those which have been done already.