(2017-04-14, 19:53)End Unsure Wrote: Having done a fair amount of cg modeling and animating I've extracted a few lego pieces for use in programs I'm more familiar with. These things have some of the most insane meshes I've ever seen and the details on them (faces, words, printed designs etc...) are actual models, floating off the main model instead of being a simple texture.
Why??? wouldn't it be easier to have them be a texture with a black and white transparency map that tells the computer which parts to not re-color when you select a new color?
Obviously it all works, Ldraw is an amazing program and its part authors are damn hard workers but I want to understand why this route was taken.
The LDraw file format was created before texture mapping was reasonable on consumer hardware, and so did not include support for texture mapping. Support was eventually added to the file format, but as of yet it's still not supported by the parts tracker, nor is it (or probably will ever be) supported by MLCad, which was historically the most popular LDraw editor. Parts Tracker support is required to get the textures into official files, and people need to stop using MLCad for it to be likely for them to catch on. Fortunately LDCad, which is becoming more and more popular (and may even surpass MLCad at this point) supports textures.
The lack of support on the parts tracker is (I think) due simply to lack of time by the people running it. There are texture mapped files on the tracker with simple fallback geometry, along with a note with a URL to the texture file. Hopefully textures will become the norm once they are supported by the parts tracker.