(2024-11-08, 4:20)N. W. Perry Wrote: I envision underside details like this to be part of a system of aesthetic enhancements that can be applied client-side, just as primitive substitution is currently. I would imagine it being settable on a per-part basis, so that you could apply underside detail only to those elements that are exposed in your build, for example, or if you want to choose a certain historical variant of a printed brick.
So you would not have to model endless versions of library parts, but rather code the information as some kind of metadata or perhaps a shadow library. Only the base version would need to appear in the library.
This is one of those things that I envision as part of LDraw 2.0 (which, to be clear, has yet to exist).
What about separating the underside variations into subfiles, leaving only the parts common to all variations in the main file? Complete variations could then be constructed using the shortcut approach.
The part-independent common reinforcements could also be made into primitives in the same way technic has many modular primitives to choose from. That would make the creation of mold variations a matter of mix and match.