Modeling lego hair pieces

savio

Hello everyone, I've been tasked in my CAD class to render lego hair pieces using Rhino and i was wondering if i can get some advice on how i can do this. The problem i'm having the most trouble with is just replicating organic shapes and texture similar to that of current lego hair. This is my first CAD class so im not a whiz with all the tools yet.

Mynatt

I am very familiar with AutoCAD but only know a little about rhino. From using both of them, I know that replicating organic forms is extremely hard. I know in AutoCad to achieve various organic forms is by using the sweep/loft commands, I don't know if there is something similar in Rhino. You may also have some luck with the boolean command with union and subtracting different objects. 

While going through google images, I do not know how you would make half of these in rhino or AutoCAD. It is possible but doesn't seem easy in the slightest. I think these two you may have the best of luck with:



For the black hair piece, I would say to start with a sphere and mess around with adding and subtracting different parts. I think you would have the easiest luck with the 1st image. 

I would be interested to see what you would be able to come up with!

savio

Thank you for your help! It has been very frustrating to say the least. I've spent roughly 5ish hours on this so far. I think i'll try a mixture of what you said with cage editing. i'll keep you posted with the end result.

BrickByBrick

Interesting. I've never heard of rhino, and I have only used AutoCAD for 2d, but I am alright with Autodesk Inventor and I'm good with Solid works. Can't say I've ever tried anything like that, but sweep/loft/bend are your friends. Lots of planes too. Good luck.

elspankdog

cheat and do a minecraft head

samiam391

I thought that this was perhaps an advertisement... a platform for my leap to modeling stardom. 

mtpelepele

I don't know Rhino, sorry, but I teach AutoCAD and Inventor (I actually use models of LEGO bricks to teach assembly constraints!).  You're going to want to turn your solid into a mesh.  It's really the only way to get shapes that complex.  Once it's in a mesh, you can push/pull edges and vertices to get the shape you desire. Hope this points you in the right direction.  Good luck!

BrickByBrick

mtpelepele said:

I don't know Rhino, sorry, but I teach AutoCAD and Inventor (I actually use models of LEGO bricks to teach assembly constraints!).  You're going to want to turn your solid into a mesh.  It's really the only way to get shapes that complex.  Once it's in a mesh, you can push/pull edges and vertices to get the shape you desire. Hope this points you in the right direction.  Good luck!

HOW CAN YOU STAND USING INVENTOR???
At the school I go to we use Solidworks, but for CAM operations we use Inventor. I will never get used to it. It's just bad.

mtpelepele

BrickByBrick said:

HOW CAN YOU STAND USING INVENTOR???
At the school I go to we use Solidworks, but for CAM operations we use Inventor. I will never get used to it. It's just bad.

I love Inventor!  I've always found it to be the most user friendly of any solid modeling programs.

BrickByBrick

Have you ever used Solidworks? Once I'd tried it I could never go back.

savio

@BrickByBrick thank you for your help. I was using cage edit and it was taking up massive space and time with little progress so I ended up drawing curves and using a points on tool to manipulate the curves and then piped them afterwards. Although it did not turn out exactly the way Lego would model hair pieces, it has turned out to be something I could live with. I'll post it once it's completely done. Again, thank you all for the great input!

MaffyD

I'll just leave this here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/krisajenkins/status/710228939726315520/photo/1/

savio

So this what i came up with in Rhino. Don't think Lego would do it this way but i thought it turned out pretty cool.

Mynatt

Looks great! The hair piece on the right would have to be my favorite part. If I might ask, how did you go about creating the right hair piece and the blonde hair piece?

savio

Thank you for the complements. After many failed attempts using cage edit, i started drawing organic lines on one flat plane and then used "points on" which is similar to cage edit, and i moved the lines around in a 3d format and then i "piped" the lines. After i was done with the hair, i "unioned" them together and then did a "boolean difference" between that and the lego head. A lot of the hair strands were also copied and "scaled" to different sizes so i didn't have to continuously make new strands.