I've been working on a POV-Ray export for LDCad 1.6
I'm not seeking to replace LDView's export I mainly want to do animation exports.
I would be very interested what the more experienced POV-Ray users have to say about the generated file I've got so far.
Attached is a zip with some test output, It renders like so:
I think it's not bad but it could be better, probably by tweaking the global settings / light (currently it exports the OpenGL light position) / sky sphere stuff.
One thing I don't really understand is the small black square at the bottom left, I have no idea where that's coming from.
Any help / pointers / thoughts would be highly appreciated.
For Beginners: LDCad 1.5 Part Bins for EV3 Education 45544-1, Part 1 of 6
I'm volunteering in a classroom that uses the Mindstorms EV3 Education kit 45544-1 and I'm making MOCs for advanced students. I need building instructions and am using LDCad to create the LDraw model. LDCad is an impressive part editing program!
As Philippe Hurbain has pointed out, the ability of LDCad to present six different part bins organized by type (for example beams, connectors, pins, etc. from the same set) makes the building process fast and intuitive.
I tried to use BrickUtils as described in this thread and got thoroughly confused. It's probably a wonderful application, but as a novice I couldn't get anything to work, and had no idea how to proceed. So I decided to follow Roland's LDCad online documentation and do some trial & error analysis.
I'm going to show I got the part bins to work, in excruciating detail, for any other LDCad novices who want to enjoy the building features of LDCad and need help with the part bin configuration. All the files shown in screenshots below are available for download at the bottom of the last post. Use this example to create your own part bin configurations for your favorite sets.
I'm breaking it up into six segments so corrections and comments from experienced users will be easier to manage.
For this exercise, the goal is to have two part bin options for the EV3 kit:
--- a single EV3-Edu part bin with all the parts in one bin. It's configuration is associated with the name "EV3-Edu" as described below.
--- six part bins with similar parts together like beams, pins, axles, etc. The configuration of these six bins is associated with the name "45544-1-sorted" as described below.
The EV3-Edu kit consists of a tub with the large parts, plus a red tray with thirteen bins for the small parts and a guide to which parts should go in which bin. We want each of our six LDCad part bins to be one or more of these bins.
On a Windows 10 system, the image below shows where the LDCad 1.5 "partbin" folder is located, under C:\Users\Walt as shown. The LDCad 1.5 installation creates and populates the "default" folder. We don't want to change the "default" folder because it might be overwritten by LDCad upgrades. We want a parallel folder with a person's name so it's clear that it isn't part of the official installation. I chose to name it "Walt's Parts."
Edit the "sysRoot.pbg" file to add "Walt's Parts" as shown. When you launch LDCad 1.5 and click the up arrow in the Bin Selection window, you will now see pictures corresponding to each of the two folders. LDCad 1.5 goes into those folders and finds corresponding images (described below) to make the selection choices clear. This pattern will repeat in the examples below: LDCad 1.5 opens things listed in <items> to locate pictures to associate with those items.
How can I make the edges more visible in transparent clear parts?
I made the edge pure black, but that is not enough to see how things are build.
See the example attached.
I need to make sure the builder can see how the 1x2 and 1x1 transparent plates are placed.
My design idea is to render 1:1 parts relative to the selected LPub3D page units (centimeters or inches). This feature would only apply to Technic axles, beams, liftarms and some gears.
My requests for information are:
1. Is there any place I can find the size dimensions for the part types indicated above - in mm, in or LDU ?
2. If this information is not available, is anyone willing to provide this information - for example a part author who may have this information on hand ?
2. Type: Icon, Category: Sticker, Description: Plain white on black background sticker icon to indicate the application of a sticker - without number identification. Note: the example shown indicates the number 1. For LPub3D, no identification is requested.
I just want to know if there exists an open source algorithm for the primitive generation...?
Okay... for rings and cones I have to round the sinus/cosinus to 4 decimal places (and then multiply it with a radius)...
...and round the result again to four dp (how should I round?)...
I know very well how to generate a (torus) primitive... but what are the precise numerical requirements for this task?
Is there any formal description which will lead to the same results on all machines?
What are the specified rounding modes?
Can I write a primitive generator program without a specification?
Currently, I am doing reverse engineering with PrimGen2...
...it seems to be (nearly) impossible to clone.
I make very good progress, but from time to time IEEE 754 pushes me back to the ground.
The mechanics of PrimGen2 are very clear to me and I know that .NET uses a different Math.Round() function than Java...
...it is not easy to finish the implementation soon.
I need some clever advice.
I'm looking for a substitution part for a length of string without end studs, an undetermined length of rolled up string.
Does such a substitute part exist anywhere? I haven't seen it on the tracker, but maybe one of you knows if someone has prepared anything like this (in the same way there are other substitution parts / unofficial parts / helper parts available)
I uninstalled all my LDraw related programs and I'm slowly building up my setup again. This time round I am not using the All-In-One-Installer and I have not been able to figure out how to enable LDView thumbnail generation for Windows Explorer.
I would like .ldr .mpd and possibly even .dat files to automatically become thumbnail images of the corresponding digital elements in Windows Explorer. How do I enable this manually?
Mirroring
This works out of the box on most parts assuming those parts are symmetrical in the X direction or not symmetrical at all. Parts having a left and right version will also usually work out of the box as the feature uses the 'left' / 'right' phrases in descriptions to locate the counter part. All other parts will need shadow information to tell the feature how to mirror and or what the counter part is. I added this information for the technic panels and some technic pins. I will add more during the beta stage. Any help on this is also appreciated
(MPD/OMR) file cleanup
This is a generic fle clean dialog which lets you handle things like prefixes, removal of unused submodels and part embedding etc
Layered grouping (EXPERIMENTAL)
Quick and dirty implementation of layering. This allows for the different group configurations of overlapping content. You can also use it to temporary disable grouping to work with the loose items without having to ungroup first.
Redirection removal
This will replace ~moved to, alias and coloured parts in the selection with their final destinations.
And many bugfixes and small tweaks.
Like usual.
This will probably be the last Alpha version as only two major things are remaining.
I think this is the most stable Alpha so far, it might even be on par with 1.5 but please realize this is still a test version so it might be (very) unstable use it separate from your normal LDCad installation and make backups of the files you want to edit.
