It was brought up elsewhere that charging for LDraw programs might bring the wrath of TLG down on us. I have my doubts. They have to enforce their trademarks always, as this is part of how trademarks work, but as MB etc. have proved the parts themselves are not trademarked. Furthermore the LDraw library would still be free, and it's the only thing that in any remote way might breach copyright.

However, while thinking about this I realised something more worrying. It is possibly that D1sney's lawyers might come after "iconic D1sney brands" (remember this now includes Star Wars) as represented on printed tiles and minifig components. Basically all the parts that aren't allowed outside their lines contain copyrighted designs (facial expressions, logos etc.) which we are reproducing. This is possibly in breach of copyright.

Do we have any lawyers here who could say something about this issue?

While it is "fanart" is probably not going to get stomped on. But you never know.

Tim

PS. Please use D1sney as I do in any responses to not make us a target of click-and-search law crap.

Post here Number/Description (preferably also with a link) of the parts you are currently working on.

Hi all,

There is a strange problem going on I cannot solve.

I have added a new unofficial part to my library downloaded from the partstracker.
It concerns part 11211 Brick, Modified 1 x 2 with Studs on 1 Side.

I have put it in <LDRAWDIR>Unofficial\Parts and I use the [SCAN_ORDER] option in MLCad.ini.
However MLCad cannot find the part.
I generated a new partslist from MLCad... no succes. The part is not in the list.
So I decided to put the parts in the official parts folder and generate a new parts.lst file using good old mklist.
It ended up in the parts list just fine.
However, it does NOT show in MLCad and I cannot find it.

I have put it in my model using Insert new part and then browse for it in <LDRAWDIR>\Parts\11211.dat. It added it just fine to the model and it showed. Saving the model, closing MLCad, start MLCad again en open the file gives an error:
File 11211.dat not found! Continue loading?

Putting the part file in the same folder as my model does not help either.
How is this possible? Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Jaco

I would really like to have a place, where the part authors can write on which part(s) they are actually working.
Maybe divided in: long term process and short term process.
This should not mean, that we should write such a message for a part that's done in a couple of hours, but ween your are working on a part for some days or weeks, it is much more frustrating, if someone else loads this part into the PT and you have "wasted" your time.

/Max

dear LSC, could we pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze get rid of the annoyance that
users cannot comment on ongoing discussions within the LSC forum?
I feel this an unproductive and unnecessary restriction.

For example, I just wanted to answer this post
http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?t...19#pid7319
which wrote
"Filename is the relative path to the file, relative to the P or PARTS directory."
, and I wanted to add that this should read probably better
"Filename is the relative path to the file, relative to the current folder, the MODELS or PARTS or P folder, in this order"
, but I wasn't able to....

I cannot imagine what such a posting restriction should be good for :-|||

I'm in need of 1L and 2L 3mm flex hose parts. The flex hose parts I have seems to start at 3L and go up from there.

Thanks in advance!

Here is my latest LDraw tools... it finds its roots in this Steffen post. I tried to add a few features to make it more useful and flexible



Selector utility allows to select surface elements by extending a key-colored surface to its neighbours. This expansion can stop on various criteria, meeting of an edge line or of a sharp enough angle, or extend to all connected elements. Edge lines or conditional lines enclosed or bordering selection can be selected too. The selection is done by changing color of elements to key color. Optionally, selection can be moved to the end of output LDraw file.

Leonardo just announced a new LeoCAD version! As you can see, the BIG news is that this version can work directly with regular LDraw library. My own tests shows that on some machines, there maybe a speed penalty, as loading library may take a while at startup. Alternatively, you can also zip your LDraw folder (or directly use complete.zip), it's much faster then.

The support of texmap is great too! (only planar projection)

Quote: I've uploaded a new version to the website, you can download it from http://leocad.org/files/.
The biggest change is in the pieces library, it uses a new format and can optionally use the LDraw library directly. This will fix some rendering bugs that were noticeable on stickers, colored patterns and pieces with detailed geometry and also adds support to Joshua's texture mapping extension.

Version 0.79 (13/12/2012)
* Switched to a new library file format.
* Added support for texture mapped pieces.
* Added support for using the LDraw library directly.
* Load color config from ldconfig.ldr where the library is located.
* Save view layout between sessions.
* Allow the pieces search text box to auto-complete when entering piece numbers.
* Fixed errors on big endian computers.
* Zoom extents after loading a file.

I hope this is in the "right" section; if not, mods, give the noob a thousand e-lashes.

I'm working on a 3D app right now, and have had way too much "fun" in working with the Ldraw file format. I would not call my work anywhere close to compliant with the Ldraw spec, but suffice to say, I've made some progress...and along the way, rediscovered linear algebra, projections, angles, and more.

Here's a pic of what I've got working so far.


Now, for my questions:

-How do you approach non-certified BFC files? Do you check for bowtied parts? Do you treat it as uncertified even if it only contains subparts/primitives? Unfortunately, due to resource limitations, I cannot simply duplicate every noncertified polygon I come across, so I've had to learn to process said polygons as if they are two-sided (which has NOT been fun). I cannot recall, but somewhere between 2997/2998 and 6581/6582, I encountered flipped polygons, bowtied polygons, and more...enough that I have a headache from all that checking.

-Do you have any recommendations on how to perfect normal smoothing? If I find two triangles meet at an angle 180 += 30, I consider them to be part of a curve and I smooth them proportionally to the triangle corner angles. I seem to get a little too much smoothing out of that, but I need to be able to catch at least 180+=22.5 to smooth the stubs (plus using the 48 versions isn't an option).

-How accurate are the ldraw parts? This may be a very bold statement to make, but I do plan to perform intelligent part snapping based solely on the polygons I extract from a ldr file.

-Legally: Can "The Lego Group" prevent me from selling an app I make (provided that I do not use their trademark)? If I want to use the ldraw parts library, what's the recommended way to share it? It seems that, aside from parts/756.dat parts/s/2336s35.dat, I could distribute the zip myself. (Edit: nevermind per #2. I see there's a link for CCAL-compliant parts).

-is there anything you wish you had known when you started working on your program?

Thanks in advance

The following thread says that the current documentation for the 0 Name: line in the LDraw spec is incorrect:

http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?t...56#pid7256

While I personally feel that the current documentation is more ambiguous than outright wrong (there's some ambiguity in the term "filename"), I agree that it would be better for the spec to be clear and unambiguous.