Modeling Program: dealing with curves?

[DR4296]

Greetings All!

I've used Pepakura Designer to build several costumes now.

But I was watching a 4 hour long video tutorial over at the Stan Winston School of Character Arts... the one where the teacher is building a "life-sized" T-Rex.

And he uses this method of carving a smaller version of the head first... and then he takes cloth and drapes it over it (in small sections). He presses the cloth flat and takes up folds created by the curvature of the model into "darts"... and pins these folds / darts into place.

Then he just outlines and labels these pieces and cuts them apart. The "darts" become cuts / gaps in each cloth piece.

Then he simply traces these cloth pieces, blows them up with a projector, traces them again, then traces them yet-again onto 1 inch foam. The foam then gets cut up into pieces and the parts get glued together / bent and curved to form the enlarged model.

It struck me, while watching this, how similar this is to what Pepakura does. The only difference is that he's translated CURVES into flat pieces...instead of flat pieces from an overall polygon into flat pieces. And those "darts" are just "v"-shaped cuts in the pattern, just like any old v-shaped pair of lines in Pepakura.

That made me wonder: Isn't there SOME SOFTWARE out there that would do this -- perhaps something for the dress / clothes-designing industry? I realize that most 3D imaging software seems to work off of polygons, but I'm thinking that same software does have the ability to at least DISPLAY curves. So why not something that will break such curved items apart ?


Thanks!

-= Dave =-

 

[Sigma-LS]

Pepakura Designer already does this. It has since at least Designer 2. You just need to increase the fold angle. I found 160 degrees gets you great curves and you then adjust the parts when you're unfolding in the layout for the final sculptural look. No reason to fold every polygon.

 

[DR4296]

"increase the fold angle".... not sure what you mean by that? Is that a setting within Pepakura Deisgner then? I tried Googling for that phrase and the only additional info about it I could find was that I should look for "Line Configuration". Can't seem to find that either. I'm running latest version of Pepakura Designer 3.

I got my mesh of my model from a free .obj file, which I then imported into Pepakura and converted to a .pdo. Are you saying, then, that, regardless of how many "folds" are in the original mesh, Pepakura Designer's fold angle function can then smooth the folds out into nice curves?

Wow, makes me think the teacher in this video should have started with a Pep file, smoothed it in the manner you describe, printed it on standard paper, and then had Kinkos enlarge the pages to the massive scale he was using. Would have saved a ton of time. (Of course, would the final shape / curves of the T-Rex head have been as "accurate" as he'd have wanted? Not sure.)

Thanks!

-= Dave =-

 

[DR4296]

Is it Settings -> Other Settings -> Line Style -> Hide almost flat folding lines threshold ?

 

[Sigma-LS]

Is it Settings -> Other Settings -> Line Style -> Hide almost flat folding lines threshold ?

Yes, then adjust the angle to 160-175.

 

[DR4296]

OK, so visually, in the Designer, it sort of looks like that that does is keep the same polygon, but the actual number of marked folds is drastically reduced. So that means, I need to sort of adjust my thinking about what I'm seeing: when I connect these folds with real paper / cardstock, the "extra edges" I'm seeing in the Designer won't actually be printed on the paper....and when I assemble the paper, I guess I need to keep in mind that I need to make sure to curve these parts more in order to create a more rounded appearance?

Am I right about that? I think I just didn't realize that the Designer still shows you the old bends and folds...which you wont' actually be using / which won't actually be printed on the 2D version. It's too bad there's not some button / view mode that I could press to show me those areas as rounded.

Oh well.

Thanks!

 

[Sigma-LS]

Yep. You got the idea. Just print out a test model and you'll be amazed at the difference. All those polys without lines are now just a smooth piece of paper.

Keep in mind, the unfolding layout still matters a great deal. You'll want to take apart a compound curve in bands and so forth to keep the proper shape. Just go naturally along the lines of the object like you saw in the video with the cloth process.