I’m trying to figure out how to make and adjust darts for a basic top through my favourite method: trial and error. All in all it’s going pretty well, but there is this one pesky obstacle that I just can’t seem to figure out.
I want to rotate two points as I have eye-balled in the image below: points B19_b1 and B20 are rotated about 5 degrees to level out the dart and make it even on both sides.
As I said, I eyeballed this rotation, but because my measurements change and because I want to make properly responsive patterns, I wanted to make a formula to make sure both points are leveled out perfectly. My idea for the rotation formula was as follows:
(AngleLine_B16_B20-AngleLine_B16_B19_b1)/2
In the image the lines I had from B16 to both of the points are not there yet, but even with these lines (when I tried the formula the lines were there) the system could not find the AngleLines and gave me an error instead.
Where am I going wrong? Do lines need to meet certain criteria to have a usable AngleLine function or is there another reason it doesn’t seem to work?
Without more info (I don’t know what error you are getting) I can only speculate… but any given tool can only access variables (line length, line angles, etc) from tools created before it.
With that being said I’m a bit confused with what you’re are trying to do with rotating the dart? There’s no need to rotate the dart. Nornally you would want B17 to B17 to be “on grain”, with the 1/2 the dart width on either side of B18. For ex: If the dart width is 1, make a point 1/2" above B18, and another 1/2" below B18. There’s your dart. You could just make the dart a fixed width or formulaize it based on the difference between the bust and waist.
I’m not getting a specific error other than the edit formula field not recognizing the angle:
But thanks for the info about the tool order! I’ll be able to fix it with that in mind.
What I wanted to achieve with the rotation of the dart is basically put it on grain again without too much of a hassle (did not go as hassle-free as planned) but also to figure out how exactly everything moves around in a pattern if I were to move things around like on paper since I usually drape my patterns. In any case, thanks for the tip!
Ok.That’s a fomula error of the math parser trying to access a tool (variable) that hasn’t been created at that point in time yet for the tool you’re trying to edit. If you are using the fx Editor it will only give you the variables that exist at that point in time of the pattern. For example… for point A4… points A5 and A6 have not been created yet, so only line angles related to A, A1, A2, and A3 are visible in the editor:
button, clicking it will open the formula editor… which I hightly recomend using as it prevents a lot of formula errors.
Also if you open the History dialog it shows the timeline order of when each tool was created, where each tool can only reference tools that came before. BTW… this timeline order also applies across multiple draftblocks… where for ex: draftblock B can reference points in draftblock A, but draftblock A can not reference points in draftblock B.
Thanks for the explanation! I use the formula editor a lot, but grew increasingly confused about not all lines showing up. This clarifies everything though, so thats great. I didn’t know about the history dialog, I’ll take a look at that as well!
Just a note on the History… there is a “time” trick one can use to insert a tool earlier in the history so that a line length or angle is then available to a later tool. This is useful when you find you forgot or should have added a tool eariler.
You place the Arrow at the tool you want to place a new tool after… in this case A3:
But thanks for the info about the tool order! I’ll be able to fix it with that in mind.
