While working on a character I noticed his resemblence to Hellraiser's PinHead. So, being the obsessive pulsist I am, I decided to see if I could recreate the skin texture. Next thing I know I'm placing 150 Pins in his head. It took 2 hours to place the first 15 pins. Does anyone have a better way to create this as a smart prop to fit Michael 3. I'm using P5 and would appreciate any help! Once we obsessives get sidetracked it's hard to complete anything else when we get stuck until we overcome that obstacle. Thanks!

Maybe I'm talking through my hat here, but would it be possible to use a skull cap and dynamic hair for this? mac

I thought about that and tried that first, but I still had to place a ball prop on the tip of each hair. A 50mm ball object floating around Poser space is a nightmare! At least with the Pin I can control and see it better. Thanks for the thought Mac!

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/PPP/tiler.zip

Try my Tiler script. It can put copies of a simple prop into every facet of a mesh, and adjust (scale, rotate) all of the copies at once.

Thanks Ockham, I'll give it a try. Anything beats trying to manipulate these blastid things in to position one at a time!

This is exactly the kind of boring job that Tiler was designed to help with.

Well, thanks but I don't think it's going to work. I'm up to 27,000 some odd pins on the head and it's still going. Started it about 20 minutes ago and it's not doing well. Thanks anyways!

27000? Yow!!! Would it help to have an "alternate-facet" control on the script, so that it hits only every other, or every 4th facet?

I don't know what it takes to write the fantastic scripts that you do, but the tiler was placing a pin on every facet. Since I was using Michael 3, it's placing it on every facet of his head I assume. The script showed no grouping but did initialize. I had to kill it because it would take longer to remove them than to place 150. Using a complicated object like Michael was probably my fault. I should have used a skull cap for the test and that would at least limit the results and then place the face pins manually, hmmm... that;s an idea I think I'll try! Thanks again. Maybe you're right about being able to choose every so mamy facets as an alternative for complicated objects.

If you use the grouping tool before applying the script, you can at least isolate part of the scalp, so the script isn't trying to pin the whole head.

Thanks again. I'm going to try applying to a skull cap for the head pins. Right now I'm finishing placing the face pins first. Gosh I hate being such an anal retentive person! (At least that's what the ex called me.) Thanks again for your suggestions and for all the scripts and other advice you provide to us here!

hmmm I'd be inclined to take a m3 skullcap into a modeler and bevel all the vertices a teensy bit, than move them out from the skull and do a little extrude/scale/extrude dance to get the pinheads. I just tried that on a sphere in Wings and it came out nicely ... a v3 skullmap made Wings crash ..so try a different modeler :) I will keep my pinnedball though ..its a nifty widget

I haven't worked too much in any modeling programs yet. I have Wings, Carrerra, and Truespace 4.3 but have never been able to figure out how to use them. Wings has almost no documentation and Truespace is just too complicated for my feeble old brain so far. Carrera is just a plain pain! Thanks for the thought maybe as I get braver I'll spend more time learning actual modeling. Glad you have a nifty widget now!

Pinhead actually has nails in his head not 'pins' as the name suggests. If you do an image search in google, i'm sure that you'll find plenty of pics. Hope you get this working d-larsen, let us know how you got on and what method you used!

Yes, you are mostly correct about that. They actually used 1 1/2" "plastic" phone nail brads #10 size for the prostestics. They couldn't use real nails because of SAG and OSHA rules. The plastic flat head nails looked really poor because of the flat head and the the decision was made to use rounded head nail brads modeled after hat pins. My understanding is that PinHead came about from an off-handed remark that Clive Barker made during the shooting of Hellraiser referencing a certain person on the set whom he had a confrontation with over "artistic licenses" being taken with his novel. Sorry, TMI and I digress, I'll definitely post the results and the methods used. Thanks for the interest!

Up to 133 objects placed. Sorry Ockham, I couldn't get the Tiler script to work for this. It still placed 350 pins onto both sides of a skull cap with only one group selected on the skull cap. So, I went to placing them manually. Oh well, good thing there's nothing good on TV tonight!

when you get a pin placed on the head you should be able to copy the parameters, then paste them on the next pin which will put the new pin in the same spot on the head. Then change the x-axis of the new pin from positive to negative or vice versa and it will move the pin to the other side of the head in what should be it's proper place (you may need to adjust the rotations from positive to negative as well).

Thanks Farside, I never had thought of that. I did copy the pin several times throughout the manual placement to the props library as I placed them on different parts of the head in order to minimize the amount of movement needed. Thanks again for the reminder.