More work on Skins placement and sizing

Making a Shell

I feel like a seamstress where I am re-assembling pieces to form a suite or coat over the outer part of BB-8s drive system.

The difficulty of this process is its not to perfect 1:1 scale for the ball, infact its off by a few mm.
This makes it difficult in using any kind of pattern or template, I ended up in the end using the templates for reference and using common household items as helpers, created the same geometric shapes and such to mimic the original designs on his outer ball.

As we saw previously, I had cut out and shaped the circles and triangles... I traced the initial portions that related to the sides and was planning to work from there around the rest of the ball.  You can see above the outlines of where the circles were placed.

I used a single triangle to form the others... this helped quite a bit.

When all was said and done... I had over 16 pieces of plastic that were used (2 were for spares)

Here is my initial sketching on the circle mimicking one of the pieces... I have to do 6 unique designs in all and try to match as well as can be the original design.  Once I am done sketching, I use a wood carving tool to etch into the plastic to create the illusion of separate pieces.  following all the lines.

After 6 hours of sketching and etching I am done.  These pieces are all ready to be masked and painted.

I ended up doing a loose fit test of all the pieces on the ball, using the tape I used for 3D printing... it didn't hold too well.

I ended up using common 3M masking tape, worked better. Looking good... not too many gaps.

Oh great... look at this gap... the last piece too... ok so I am going to either:

1. Create a custom triangle to fill it

2. Create several custom triangles to fill evenly around the circle.

I will choose 2 I think... I have enough spares.

Again the other sides align great and look awesome... excited.

Very excited to see this coming together.

Here is a closeup of the fitting.

You can see where I overlap the sides so I can make a clean cut between the triangles.

I had to do it... placed the old dome on the body... viola!