Hello Scott,
I'm of course not too happy with these counterarguments.
I appreciate that you do not want to clutter ldconfig.ldr, but I do not as well.
I also cannot follow your counter-arguments,
please let me ask some questions against the points you make:
(1) > I don't want to clutter up ldconfig with colors that are no longer made.
Why should this be an argument against introducing a magnet material?
We model parts ranging from the very beginnings, even including Mursten, up to today.
We also have a color for "milky white" e.g. for the historic antenna. That's nice!
So if magnets were present in the 80's, why not add this material?
It is needed to properly model the parts, currently we substitute the magnets with dark grey plastic
material, but that is logically wrong and just a workaround. That it looks bad in renders is just an additional oddity.
The magnet material simply has been forgotten when creating the materials for rubber and metal.
It is just a missing one.
(2) >> and were only used for one part.
That is not true. Example parts using this material are:
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/73092
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/x799
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/735
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/x547
You can see also from peeron that this material was present in lots of sets.
When playing with these sets in LDRAW - which I do - the absence of that material becomes
simply just evident.
(3) >> Otherwise, there would be a lot of colors that we would need to add.
Could you be more specific here? I cannot imagine more missing materials. I would be happy if you could name them.
Ah, while thinking, just one, maybe: "black thread" (for hooks etc.)
But besides that? LEGO consists of 99% ABS plastic, and the addition of "foreign" materials is minimal:
just some metal variants, some rubber for tyres etc., and, well, this very magnet material.
What other materials are you anticipating?
I'm not asking for 100 new materials. Just 1. A single line in ldconfig.ldr, which would allow correct logical
modeling of the materials, and would allow to easily assign a material to this when raytracing.
Using the grey plastic substitute has as consequence that you manually have to edit each file
before you can ray-trace it properly. You have to tediously look up the parts where the "substitution grey plastic"
color is used, and change that to magnet material.
Why force the users to do that, when this can easily be avoided by adding a single line in ldconfig.ldr?
...
I'm of course not too happy with these counterarguments.
I appreciate that you do not want to clutter ldconfig.ldr, but I do not as well.
I also cannot follow your counter-arguments,
please let me ask some questions against the points you make:
(1) > I don't want to clutter up ldconfig with colors that are no longer made.
Why should this be an argument against introducing a magnet material?
We model parts ranging from the very beginnings, even including Mursten, up to today.
We also have a color for "milky white" e.g. for the historic antenna. That's nice!
So if magnets were present in the 80's, why not add this material?
It is needed to properly model the parts, currently we substitute the magnets with dark grey plastic
material, but that is logically wrong and just a workaround. That it looks bad in renders is just an additional oddity.
The magnet material simply has been forgotten when creating the materials for rubber and metal.
It is just a missing one.
(2) >> and were only used for one part.
That is not true. Example parts using this material are:
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/73092
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/x799
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/735
http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/x547
You can see also from peeron that this material was present in lots of sets.
When playing with these sets in LDRAW - which I do - the absence of that material becomes
simply just evident.
(3) >> Otherwise, there would be a lot of colors that we would need to add.
Could you be more specific here? I cannot imagine more missing materials. I would be happy if you could name them.
Ah, while thinking, just one, maybe: "black thread" (for hooks etc.)
But besides that? LEGO consists of 99% ABS plastic, and the addition of "foreign" materials is minimal:
just some metal variants, some rubber for tyres etc., and, well, this very magnet material.
What other materials are you anticipating?
I'm not asking for 100 new materials. Just 1. A single line in ldconfig.ldr, which would allow correct logical
modeling of the materials, and would allow to easily assign a material to this when raytracing.
Using the grey plastic substitute has as consequence that you manually have to edit each file
before you can ray-trace it properly. You have to tediously look up the parts where the "substitution grey plastic"
color is used, and change that to magnet material.
Why force the users to do that, when this can easily be avoided by adding a single line in ldconfig.ldr?
...