(2019-11-04, 22:19)Johann Eisner Wrote: Sorry, I [color=unset]misinterpreted N. W.
[/color]I thought he would change the .dat file.
Oh, no, I wasn't proposing to change the part itself, just the one instance of it within the model. I've already tested it and it doesn't affect any other instance of the part.
If I were to change the part itself, I certainly would save it as a separate custom part. I've actually done this in the past: for example, in the 950 Fork Lift, there is a stack of seven 2x2 bricks that comes up 4 LDU proud of the connection it's supposed to make with some vertical beams. I created a custom part of a 2x2 brick that is 1 LDU too short, and mixed four of those with three normal ones to make the connection. (This was easier than distributing the 4 LDU error evenly across seven bricks, and is visually imperceptible unless you really know what to look for.)
I tend to agree with Travis that scaling a part, whether ad hoc or as a custom part, tends to feel somewhat "illegal", but then again it's true that real-world parts do have not only some physical tolerance between them, but also a certain amount of flexibility that has to be accounted for if you want to accurately represent them in a model—particularly if you want to do photo-realistic rendering. Applying the matrix on a case-by-case basis, as long as we're talking about small fractions of adjustment (and we are, since the real-world tolerances only go so far), does seem to me the most elegant solution. I certainly would rather stretch a single part by a tiny amount then try to bend all the surrounding bricks to make it fit!
So can I infer from that "illegality" that there aren't any tools or editors for figuring out the matrix adjustment within LDraw proper? For example, in Studio/Part Designer, which operates a little outside of the basic LDraw standard, I can free scale a part by dragging some handles, or by typing in precise dimensions, but I'd have to know what dimensions to enter. I could calculate those by using LDCad's distance measurement, I suppose, but I'm also morbidly curious about which boxes of the matrix actually control scaling along which axes of the part. (Most online articles about rotation matrices are either highly technical, or along the lines of "this topic is extremely mysterious; we can't really explain it so you'll just have to figure it out by trial-and-error.")