Hey there everyone! Could someone please get that new version of Gimli's helmet from the builders app? If you can get the printing too that'd be perfect, but it is not necessary!

Bricklink Code: 2675pb01

Thread for Toy Story Sets

This post is to document that the agreed upon description for 44247 is:
Constraction Torso  9 x  2 x  2 with Partial Gear 20 Double Bevel and Ball Socket Housings

When this part is authored, the above description will be used.

P.S. I'm going to delete the placeholder part on the PT

Thread for Friends 2023 sets

In anticipation of the Steering Committee election in March, the ability to sign up as an LDraw Member is now open.

To join go to the below URL. 
http://library.ldraw.org/joinldraw
The system will verify your forum credentials, present the LDraw.org Bylaws for your review, and then ask you to certify you meet the membership requirements. If you encounter an error, please let me know as soon as possible.

Once you have become a member, you can verify by voting in the currently active poll:
http://library.ldraw.org/polls

hello me want othrographic front view of this piece 😂



  s-l400.jpg (Size: 14.46 KB / Downloads: 218)

bye 😂

Hey y'all. I need help. I'm trying to add parts 3386, 5091, and 5092 to LeoCAD, but I just can't seem to figure it out. I downloaded all of them off the main site, both the dat. and the ZIP files, but no matter what I do, they don't appear when I search them while designing. What can I do?

So where can I find and download the complete library of official parts? I've been looking it up but I still have no clue really.

Hallo,

über Umwege wurde ich darüber informiert, dass für meine Teile (u.a. https://library.ldraw.org/parts/8865) die Lizenz angepasst werden soll.
Da ich seit Ewigkeiten (20 Jahre oder so) nicht mehr hier war, musste ich einen neuen Account erstellen.
Wenn mir jemand Infos bzgl. des Vorgehens geben könnte, dann kann ich das Umstellen in Angriff nehmen.

Hilflose Grüße,
Sascha

Hello,

a bit of a rambling post

curious if other people have attempted to improve the quality of the ldraw meshes through mesh processing.

Several meshes suffer from these:
* non-manifold edges & vertices (triangle edges share more than one neighbor)

* self-intersection
* disjoint surfaces. Sometimes triangles/quads are not sharing the same positions along edges, when they should. Often when triangle segments were stitched together to appear to be curved.
* t-junctions (because there is no proper ngon support)

As the tools back in the day weren't exactly great and hardware was limited by other means, it's understandable that the basic definition of the content today feels a bit dated. One alternative is to "properly" create the models through CAD or subdivision-surfaces as true solids. 

Which some people have done see https://grabcad.com/dk/models 
However that doesn't play nice with the ldraw ecosystem and accessibility. Mecabricks exported parts are not allowed to be redistributed, which also doesn't make them a solution.

It seems the typical approach in some ldraw apps and importers is to detect a few primitives and replace them with higher resolutions (cylinders, discs, etc.). However that may not always work well with adjoint surfaces that share spatial edges, but are not a primitive. Furthermore it doesn't cover other smooth surfaces.

Fixing things up in blender or other 3d tools after something has been converted to 3d meshes, seems like some key information is lost. Furthermore, 3d packages generalized solutions may not be the best fit to address the mesh problems.


My thinking is that one nice thing about ldraw is that it's fairly low-resolution, meaning on todays hardware one can brute force certain things to clean up the meshes. And tessellation algorithms can make use of the "edges" etc. to detect the intent. Some fixes could be done on the .ldr directly, like certain vertices snapped to other positions etc.

Compared to past
* there are robust open-source (no GPL etc.) mesh processing (booleans etc.), polygon triangulation... algorithms out there today
* due to 3d printing in general also more research in mesh cleanup for solids
* rendering hardware is a lot more capable
* much more CPU cores for processing... (and this has to happen only once).


so my question: has this been attempted before? how do others see the future of ldraw's mesh quality for rendering (maybe what I am describing isn't perceived as that desirable)? Is there interest among the programmers of importers/exporters/tools in the ldraw community to go in such a direction?

There seem to have been some threads on "modernizing" the spec and such, but they seem like decades ago, so I guess we can assume things stay as is and so the kind of automated processing is the only realistic option?