(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 main reason is legacy as LDraw was invented by James with vector 'decals' in mind (maybe even no patterns at all?). Also during that age hardware accelerated VGA was far from common (maybe the occasional extension card). So doing texturing in software only was way more work and might be too slow.
Now a days we do have a way to texture parts using png images, but many of the part modelers still prefer the vector based style as that often results in higher quality during zooming.
And also textured parts are not yet integrated in the official library part tracker.