Those ever-lasting moments of head-desking

[Santeri Piippo]

I was collecting parts from my container thingies so that I could put together a jetrax for the sake of 2008 (which was IMO Bionicle's gold year).. noticed I had one of the engine turbine parts missing. Took quite a few days of looking around everywhere until I finally found it in the only place I had forgotten to look at.

So there I was sitting on my bed and thought about those past attempts I had made to make another LDraw part again (stuff like modeling the teeth of the rotating blades, staff of fragmentation, etc) with the turbine part in hand and a wild idea caught me. LDraw's parts tracker revealed that there was an earlier attempt, but being 16-division-circles and lacking some geometry (like the fan interior details), I decided to give my own attempt on the part instead of trying to finish the existing one. Changing resolutions in circles tends to be pretty bad on one's hairs.

So I got the main skeleton done, along with the outer fan blades (which were challenging but doable with a bit of philotools), when I suddenly realized -- those smaller, outer fan blades weren't as systematic as the inner ones. My usual tricks (or at least the ones I still remember) couldn't really help this time around. It was at this point I remembered the LDD/LUT parts that were around when I was active last time around. After a bit of searching, found the LUT version of the part, complete with the outer fans. Just as I was already hoping to be able to finish the part, I noticed to my shock...



Yeah. the blade was too small. If I had remembered the LUT version from the beginning I probably wouldn't be feeling as foolish as I do now. What do?

[Philippe Hurbain]

You mean that the blade in LUT part is too small compared to the real part? If so (after you re-check again your measurements!), here is a method that should get the job done:
- Enlarge the part (with rotation center set to origin) till its outside goes well inside outer rim. Use edger2 to get the unmatched outer line of blade shape.
- Do the same, this time shrinking inside inner rim. Get inner line
- use Coverer between these lines to build a blade.
- compute intersection lines with Isecalc between blades and rims.

[Santeri Piippo]

> You mean that the blade in LUT part is too small compared to the real part?
It seems to be. After comparing the three wheels (LUT, mine, real one) overa nd over again I came to the conclusion that the LUT part has the outer shell a bit too thick, which causes the big gap on the outer edge. Not sure about the inner one.. gonna have to check that one.

Didn't think of that resizing method, though... thanks!