Sunday, July 10, 2011

LEGO M:Tron minifig templates

Although at first glance the image above may look almost empty, it's actually full of parts!

The thing is, they're white. ;o)

That's great for your ink cartridge, but sometimes it can be hard to see which parts are actually parts, and which parts or glueing tabs, or even scrap paper, especially on smooth parts where there are no fold lines.

For this reason I decided to make the glueing tabs light grey, so it's easier to see the difference. Unfortunately, you can't do that in Pepakura Designer yet (hint hint, Tama Soft... ;o) so I'm using Photoshop for now. ;o)

Stay tuned!

6 comments:

  1. I'm pretty sure you can do that (?) Go on the paint tool (the 3 pencils in a row) and its that.

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  2. You mean the "Set Edge Color" tool? As far as I know, I'm afraid that's just what it does: it lets you set the edge colour (the colour of the fold lines and cut lines) but not the colour of the glueing tab itself.

    Being able to change the line colours was already a big improvement from Pepakura Designer 1.0 (instead of just black fold lines, you could finally blend in the line colours with the part colours!) but on white parts, it can still be confusing which pieces are parts, and which are glueing tabs sometimes, even if you give them different line colours. ;o)

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  3. What I'm actually doing with my Boo Mario's template (which as the same problem as yours) is that I colour the cut and fold lines in medium grey and the glue tabs' cut lines in blue. So, we can easily recognize a glue tab, even printed in Lineless.

    ... but your technique should also work pretty well. It may just take a lot more time to do and reduce the resolution of the PDFs...

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  4. It really helps a lot to align the parts if you can really see the "border" where the part ends and the glueing tab begins, and not just the outlines of the glueing tab.

    With a fold line between the glueing tab and the part, that's obvious of course, but on "smooth models" like cylinders, that can be very difficult to see if everything is white except the lines... ;o)

    It would be quicker to do in Pepakura Designer (maybe in Pepakura Designer 4...?) but it's really a piece of cake with the "magic wand" in Photoshop too if you work with layers, and of course Photoshop is more than capable to keep the same resolution if you want it to. ;o)

    I kinda like fancying up the templates in Photoshop, it's fun to do and some things like adding arrows (another hint for the Tama Soft team... ;o) just can't be done in Pepakura Designer (yet)...

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  5. Yeah, Pepakura still has a lot of job froward... ; )

    Good luck! And have fun coloring the glue tabs... ; )

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  6. Yeah, but they mustn't make it too complicated with features, though!

    The beauty of Pepakura Designer is that it's so easy to use! ;o)

    I've already started the final build, actually; I had already prepared most of the parts since they were just re-colours of the ones from Captain Redbeard so it wasn't a lot of work anymore! ;o)

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