G'day

[Jason Wandel]

G'day!

As you can probably tell, I'm from Australia and wanted to say hello after joining up.

I'm hoping to submit some missing parts to the catalogue... every now and again I come across parts that have no models and end up creating them for my own use, but thought the whole community could benefit from that. I use stud.io and the associated Part Designer for my digital designs (and I have a swag of my own custom parts designed using OpenSCAD) - so if there's any gotchas about exported LDR files from there please let me know or point me towards docs (I have a suspicion there's at least one, to do with colours). Thanks.

Please note that I have lots of time but not much energy and may not respond to requests anywhere near quickly. I'm currently battling leukaemia and some portions of my chemo leave me incapacitated while other times I'm reasonably OK. I have another 18 months of that to go...

Best regards,
-J

[Orion Pobursky]

Any part authoring effort is welcome here. If you're unsure they're ready for submission simply posting to the part authoring forum will get the feedback you want.

[Willy Tschager]

Hi,

in case your prog saves or exports to .stl and you've modeled your parts in LDU you're on the safe side. Read:

http://marc.klein.free.fr/lego/stl2dat/stl2dat.html

w.

[Matthew Morrison]

A big difference is that custom textured parts that come from the stud.io part designer have the png data contained inside the file. Standard LDraw parts use image files stored on the disk. The way these textures are referenced is also very different, so no LDraw editors or viewers display them. I'm working on adding support for embedded texture data to my blender importer that includes support for stud.io parts so that will change.

Another gotcha with stud.io is that the actual protect file itself is just a password protected zip file. This means that even if you have the password, using it is legally questionable because of laws regarding DRM.

The libraries aren't shared either, which means you'll be missing parts in stud.io that you have in regular LDraw tools, and vice versa. And stud.io parts aren't terribly well optimized.

[Jason Wandel]

A big difference is that custom textured parts that come from the stud.io part designer have the png data contained inside the file. Standard LDraw parts use image files stored on the disk. The way these textures are referenced is also very different, so no LDraw editors or viewers display them. I'm working on adding support for embedded texture data to my blender importer that includes support for stud.io parts so that will change.

Another gotcha with stud.io is that the actual protect file itself is just a password protected zip file. This means that even if you have the password, using it is legally questionable because of laws regarding DRM.

The libraries aren't shared either, which means you'll be missing parts in stud.io that you have in regular LDraw tools, and vice versa. And stud.io parts aren't terribly well optimized.

OK re the texture, I did notice that when I opened the file in a text editor.

As for the .io file, that's stud.io, not part designer. PD creates .part files which are effectively .DAT files with slightly different header structure (not sure why   )

The stud.io part library is based on LDraw, but yes it is separate in that each part in it has the stud.io connectivity added. Every release, though, they're adding more and more parts out of the LDraw library so eventually I suppose it'll be close.

But what I'll do is go back and use the official LDraw .DAT parts as the starting point for the decorated parts rather than the PD ones and use a different authoring tool to apply the PNGs - hopefully that'll have the PNG as separate files, too. Thanks for the heads-up on that!