Make shoulder slope a 'degree' measurement

Implementation to-do

• Update models package
• Update neckstimate method in utils
• Add isDegMeasurement to utils
• Add support for degree measurement in workbench
• Port patterns to new shoulderSlope measurement
  • aaron
  • benjamin
  • bent
  • breanna
  • brian
  • bruce
  • carlita
  • carlton
  • cathrin
  • diana
  • florence
  • florent
  • holmes
  • huey
  • hugo
  • jaeger
  • penelope
  • sandy
  • shin
  • simon
  • simone
  • sven
  • tamiko
  • theo
  • titan
  • trayvon
  • wahid
  • waralee

Original issue

With the introduction of Breanna, we changed a bunch of measurements to be better suited to map both the male and female form. We also changed the way we measure shoulder slope, because in practice we noticed that people were routinely measuring this wrong.

I know feel like that was a mistake.

Not that the reasons weren’t legit. People really do get their shoulder slope wrong a lot of the time. But the cure might be worse than the disease. We now measure shoulder slope from down at the hip to the shoulder point. This is a very long measurement, and half a cm (or even a cm) more or less is an easy mistake to make when neither the hip line nor the shoulder point itself are things that are obviously marked on a body.

Yet, a centimeter difference in the shoulder slope measurement makes a huge different. This is very obvious when you sample the shoulder slope measurement in our development environment:

As you can see, the shoulder slope is now the highly volatile measurement that is even harder to get right. So I’ve made the situation worse.

Let slopes be slopes

I think in the end, it is just simpler to express a shoulder slope in degrees. After all, that’s what it is, a slope. Not a distance.

My first instinct was to not use a shoulder slope measurements anymore, and instead just make it an option with a sensible default that people can adapt. That has the downside that if you know you have sloped shoulders, you’re going to have to set that option manually for each pattern. That’s not great.

The solution to that is store the shoulder slope in the model, just like any other measurement, only this one is in degrees. That would work, but has the downside that now everybody has to measure their shoulder slope again, except now it’s in degrees, how do you even measure that?

Proposal

This is a tricky issue, but I think in the end we need to try and make it harder to have mistakes. So I would suggest to convert the shoulder slope measurement to a degree measurement and give everyone the same (sensible) default. A default that they can adapt if they would like that.

Once that’s done, we’d need to adapt the patterns to use the degrees, but that will make constructing the shoulder a lot simpler.

[AlfaLyr]

Hi again… I come back because I just thought about a very easy way to calculate the angle: you can just take a selfie standing straight, open the photo editor in your phone, go to the straighten option and rotate the photo until one of your shoulders is horizontal. The angle you rotated the photo is your shoulder slope 😃

[AlfaLyr]

I’m glad you like it 😃 everybody has a protractror around at home to measure angles from a ruler set from school or something, and we can add a drawing explaining how to use it… and whoever can’t be bothered to do that can just have a look at the example drawings