#patternimage

Ohai!

Unfortunately the only way to get it is to buy/rent it :C There SHOULD BE/technically is a free-trial of it, but the company who makes it very bizarrely doesn’t make it easily available anymore. I got my hands on the free trial because I took a deep dive into shady corners of the internet. 

More unfortunately, it’s quite expensive, which is why I ultimately decided not to buy it and just move on to greener pastures. It’s $2000 to purchase outright, or $400 to “rent” it yearly. Unfortunately, the rental fee is not “rent-to-buy.” IE, if you rent it for five years, even though you’ve paid a total of $2000, you would still owe them $1600 to purchase it if you’ve paid the $400 rent that year. (I had an email conversation with the company in order to clarify this.)

However, I DIDN’T give up on the idea of digitally modelling plush, and I’m currently using Blender to model plush and a program called UVlayout to unwrap the patterns. (So, in fact, I’m using Blender like EasyToy and UVlayout like PatternImage.)

Got my first pattern done! Hopefully this will kinda-sorta give an idea of how PatternImage works. Once a 3D model is made in EasyToy (or any 3D program), you can then import the model into PatternImage for the pattern-making process--and this is where the real magic happens! You draw your intended seam lines on the model, select each section, then hit a button to unwrap that section onto a 2D plane. Once unwrapped, it color-codes each piece to show you whether or not the piece is “viable” (as they put it!). If a section is colored in angry red, for instance, that generally indicates that the area needs a dart. Quite handy!

Still, I definitely don’t want to misrepresent this as something where you can enter it knowing nothing about plush design and have the computer do everything for you--that’s unfortunately not how it works! You still need to have a reasonably good grasp of where seams should go and the like. Additionally, the shapes it gives you when unwrapping it directly from the model are reasonably good approximations of a pattern piece--but I find that there’s almost always some manual adjustment required. 

But, overall, it’s still SUPER handy and I look forward to sharing the final products made from the patterns :D 

Here’s a demo of it in use (again, video not done by me!) - skip to 3:01 to see just PatternImage