Parts from set 75978 (Diagon Alley)

[Philip van Heemstra]

Beautiful!
A few tips indeed to make a good LDraw part...
- The main "problem" is that quality (number of polygons) of your mesh is a bit high compared to other LDraw parts. Eg. the ridges on the ball have about 24 segments to form the ridge, while at this size 8 segments would be enough. If you can instruct Sketchup to reduce that...
- Use two mirrored half subpart
- Use a cylinder LDraw primitive to create a clearly identified handle (connectivity outside Studio)
- Possibly use LDraw sphere primitives for part body and "eye"
- The most tedious work concerns the edge line creation. The idea is to have an edge line (LDraw type 2) when there is a clear angle on the part, and a conditional line otherwise (type 5) otherwise. Converters (Studio part designer or stl2dat) do that with a facet angle threshold, but it's far from perfect and needs a lot of manual trimming to get it right...

Thank you for all the tips! You are right, I made it overly detailed

I went back to Sketchup and rebuild the model using lower poly shapes. (Sketchup doesn't have a downgrade shape's polygons function unfortunately...  ha ha)
And I wrote the main DAT model file manually using existing primitives where possible and created repeating subparts.

   

The wings where a little hard to remake, so they are still the same ones. However, overall file size is now less than 10% of the last version. So, I hope that suffices?

Where should I upload the files? And is there a standard zip/folder/structure? (Or where can I read the guidelines about that?)