Is it soup yet?
We’ve found our model, we’ve scaled it to our body, we’ve extracted parts, traced the shapes and figured out the really hard shape… We are ready to cut the foam and build the helmet, right?
The short answer is, “No.”
The long answer is, “Almost.”
now that we have those shapes traced, we need to smooth them out before we make a pattern out of them. Since we just used points to make those paths, our pattern parts would make a lumpy helmet, and this is what we are trying to make.
See how nice and round and shiny that is? Because it is that nice and round and shiny, we need the shapes of our patterns to be nice and round as well. Additionally, I am pretty sure we need to slightly adjust the scale on… That Part™.
The main reason I think we need to adjust… That Part™ is because it doesn’t quite match up to the part that it attaches to. The part it attaches to at the back of the helmet is a slice of a cone (i.e. a truncated cone). Edges that are going to meet are different lengths and that is going to cause us problems down the road. So lets start with those two parts.
I am going to work backwards from the truncated cone so we can make sure everything is a perfect fit.
What we need to do is open our Inkscape file and move over to the are of That Part™ and it’s little buddy.
So… we are going to zoom in on the little buddy there so we can concentrate on it. Then we want to click on the node tool.
Then we are going to select all of the points on the top curve (do not get the ends in your selection). You can do this by shift clicking on each of the nodes, or you can drag and select. If you miss one or two, hold down shift and drag again to expand your selection. This is what it should look like.
What we have now is a bunch of point nodes. We need to convert them into curve nodes. Inkscape and applications like it use Beziers to handle curves… Bezier is a fancy term for curves that are adjusted in a weird way. To convert these all to curve nodes, click on the “make selected nodes symmetric” button at the top of the screen.
When you do, it’s going to change to look like this.
The diamonds you see there are our original point nodes. The circles are the Bezier handles. By playing around with the Bezier handles, we can change the nature of the curve we have. It’s hard to explain, but pretty self explanatory once you start working with it. Go ahead and select the nodes on the bottom line and make them symmetric, too.
What we are trying to do is make these nice, sweeping curves without wobbles or kinks. Play around with it. Remember, you can always undo something you just did. I found that I needed to delete some of my nodes to actually make this work (click on the node and hit delete).
Here is what I did.
Doesn’t that look pretty?
But if you look closely, the curve on the back of That Part™ don’t match up. We shouldn’t have much problem with the rest of the pattern, because we didn’t have to do much in the way of extrapolation to get those parts unwrapped.
So… we are going to cheat a little now to save us a HUGE headache later on.
The way we are going to to this is by copying this shape. Pasting it. Flipping it and conforming the other shape to match and taper down to this curve.
First click back over to the selector tool.
Click on the shape we just finished with. It will select it. Look over in your layer panel and you will see that specific path is highlighted now. Right click and select duplicate from the context menu.
It doesn’t look like it, but it made a copy of this shape. If you use the select tool, you can move it around. Move one of them to separate them for working. I am going to rename it so I don’t get confused. I am also going to lock and hide the one we want to keep.
Then we are going to click on it to select it. With it selected, we need to click this button.
That is going to flip the shape over, like this.
Then I am going to move it up so the bottom curve is pretty much sitting on the line… or as close as I can get to it. I also changed the stroke color so I can keep them straight. Then I am going to lock that shape so I can’t accidentally mess something up. It should look like this.
Now, we click on the node tool and That Part™ to start modifying it.
The first thing I want to do is move the corners of That Part™ to the corners of his little buddy. Then I want to move my other nodes to conform as close as possible to the line that we are trying to match.
Then we are going to select the nodes we want curved and make them symmetric like we did before and adjust it all.
What we just did sums up most of what we need to do with the rest of these shapes. I’m going to delete the one I made for reference. I’m also going to extend one of the other shapes downward a teeny bit because I moved this shape a bit and I want to make sure we have coverage. But go in and adjust all those nodes to have smooth curves and we are almost ready to make a pattern.
Note: I recommend making the import layers visible while you work so that you can reference them.
And when you are done, you should have something that looks a lot like this.
Believe it or not, we are ALMOST ready to call this a pattern. There are a couple things that we still need to do, though. I decided that I want to cover the “ports” on the back of the helmet where the fins go, so we will need to generate a shape for that. My main reason is that this helps define and control the shape of That Part™. Since we have had to take some liberties with That Part™, we need to make sure there is something in there to give it form. Additionally, the fins need something to attach to.
Speaking of something to attach to, the fins in the model connect to one another and make a surface inside the model. I am not sure that is going to work for what we are doing, so in the next episode, we are going to make some changes to our source model, import it into Armorsmith, scale it, extract the two new shapes we are creating and refine them.
Once all that is done, we will be ready to create our pattern and get to building our helmet.
November 20, 2025
