(2016-09-04, 0:33)Michael Horvath Wrote: How do you do LGEO part substitution in LDView? There are tooltips in the POV export options menu that are confusing, and nothing in the Help file.
In the "Native POV geometry" section, the tooltip says, "If you check this, you can put POV include files in a POV subdirectory of your POV directory and have LDView use those as replacements for part files." Do you mean "POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory"?
What do these POV INC files look like inside? How do I make this setting work with the LGEO library?
Also, it is not explained in the Help file what an XML mapping file is. What is it and where do I get one?
Yes, it was supposed to say POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory. The idea there is that you create one POV include file for each part. The POV file would be named the same as the part filename, but with .inc instead of .dat as its extension. Inside that POV file, you would have the POV geometry for the part. LDView would search the file for a #declare, and treat the first #declare as the name of the part in POV.
At one point in time, there was a project to create these .inc files, and I think there was even thought of making it an official part of LDraw. However, (IIRC) it was decided that it would be inappropriate to make it official, and I think whoever was working on it abandoned it. You can find what was made here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ldrawpov/
If you want to make your own parts, you can use the inc files from the above project as examples.
This is totally independent of LGEO. Essentially, you would create these files for parts that don't exist in LGEO (or parts where you don't like the LGEO definition).
Originally I planned to make different mapping files for different libraries. However, Anton Raves abandoned his library, and there weren't really any others, so the only file that was created was LGEO.xml, which is part of the LDView installation. Other people (like C3POwen on Eurobrikcs) have enhanced LGEO.xml. I never really intended other people to create these files, but if you look inside LGEO.xml (in the LDView install directory), you may be able to figure out how it works. Note that it's been so long since I worked on that that I don't even remember how it works. If you don't specify a file, LDView uses LGEO.xml from the LDView install directory. So, to answer the question of "How do you do LGEO part substitution," LDView uses the contents of LGEO.xml to do that.
At one point L3P-compatible inline POV statements were included in some official parts. I believe that was made illegal in the official parts spec. That check box was designed to have LDView pay attention to these statements. I don't remember what the format was (other than that they were type 0 comment lines), but if you're going to be creating custom POV for parts, the POV replacement .inc files route is definitely much better than manually editing your official LDraw parts.