3626bp66 aka Trouble with Minifig Faces

[Philip Peickert]

As I continue to finish making the parts for the Spyrius theme, I have come upon an unexpected difficulty. I am working on 3626bp66, Minifig Head with Headband and Eyebrows. I made an initial drawing in LPC which I didn't like. After reviewing the minifig heads already in the library, I redid the hair and headband in LPC and used LDDesignPad to cut and paste the parts from various minifig heads into a working part which has the standard grin and eyebrows and the blue headband at the appropriate height. I've read in the forums that SlicerPro is the program to use to convert 2D patterns onto 3D quads however I can't seem to make it work right. I have read the online documentation and reviewed the forums but I'm still confused on how to make SlicerPro do what I want it to do. What file should I select for the InFormer, and what options should I select for SlicerPro itself? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Phil

[Philip Peickert]

Sorry, just noticed that I saved those under the wrong part number. They should be 3626bp66... apologies.

Phil

[Philippe Hurbain]

Hi Phil,
What SlicerPro does is a parallel projection of the pattern on the former in chosen direction (here Z). The former should contain the 16 front quads of the face and forhead of the blank head that will receive the pattern. This pattern must cover all the projected surface area. All empty areas in the pattern will be missind in the result. The pattern may be larger than the projected former, but quality of the result will be lower: whenever possible, you should use vertices of projected former.
Here attached a former that should work for your project (obtained from regular 3626b head, primitives inlined with LDDP, useless areas removed with MLCad). By projection using LPC, I obtained head_former_proj.txt (this is actually a .lpc file, I changed the extension to be able to attach it here), this area should be covered exactly with your pattern. Problem, once you have created a new pattern triangle, LPC doesn't let you select it again, it will instead select the "background triangle". To avoid this, go to triangle mode, select everything and delete: only the vertices will remain (head_former_proj_vertices.txt). Build your pattern from that.
As for SlicerPro usage, options to use are -z (we project in z direction), -c (copy condlines from former). Depending on the results you may try to increase precision value progressively up to 0.05 to get rid of too small triangles (but going too far will distort shape and pattern, experiment with high values to get a feel of the nasty effects).

[Philip Peickert]

So my response will begin with, "I'm such a dunce"!

Philo,

When I converted the text files into LPC files they showed up as primitives instead of vertices. However you put me on the right track. I found the dimensions for the vertices of the former you sent me, and there my path to uber-dunce-dom began. Following your advice I was able to use SlicerPro to project my pattern onto the former... only to find out that the former didn't line up with the primitives I had found in the LDraw directory. After a few hours of toying in directions that got me nowhere, I finally decided to calculate out every vertex for every quadrilateral on the exterior of a minifig head and create my own former (I have only now realized several hours later, that in typical fashion I made this project much harder than it needed to be). I have attached the formers I created for both the old and new style minifig heads as well as the projections of my pattern on both minifig heads. I haven't run it through edger and I don't have any conditional lines in the design, but I thought I would give you and update of my progress.

Phil