I don't usually start like this on a forum I'm new to, but the whole stuff is totally frustrating, and I need to vent off some steam. Nonetheless, these are (imho) legal complains about something that should be an out-of-the-box success instead of a chain of failures and frustrations.
I'm really a beginner with all this digital building stuff, but I've learned that ldraw & co can be frustrating to no end.
I started with the all-in-one-installer to create building instructions. I got a lot of help and could get the basics up and running with MLCad (which I had used before to create the models) and LPub3D within a few days. But then it got frustrating. LPub3D produced really, really bad (I'm tempted to say shitty) output. Even when I set the DPI to 600 (and cleared the caches), the PDF was horribly blocky. I finally fixed that by upgrading the provided LPub3D to a more current version. Why does the current all-in-one-installer provide outdated, buggy software?
But even with the updated version, the rendering with LDGLite still just crashes when rendering the model, and I never got the PovRay rendering to work, even after hunting for obscure lg_colors and lg_materials files. The only change I got was that instead of staying open and presenting obscure error messages, it now opens and closes povray without producing anything. It still seems to produce an error of some sorts, but it immediately closes the window, so I cannot tell what the problem is, and the stdout_povray and stderr_povray files are empty.
Hunting for the LGEO library (e.g. to look for updates or to find thoses mysterious lg_colors and lg_materials) files only leads to dead ends - looks like el lutzo closed up shop with his website. Why are those mysterious files (and whatever else may be needed for rendering with PovRay) not part of the all-in-one-installer? I finally found those two files somewhere on sourceforge in another projects archive, but I have absolutely no idea if those are the right ones.
Those rendering problems lead to the idea to use L3P and the L3PAddon to attempt a rendering of the model with PovRay. Sorry, but that was a total failure. The program wants to know the location of some files (which cannot be found within the installation, ldraw files, or program installation directories) and a strange tool (ledit.exe, according to google this is a electric circuit/layout program!?!) that it cannot run at all without.
Maybe this all works for some people who have installed numerous updates over time, have some old files still hanging around from 20 versions ago that some current programs still need, but no installer provides, or have tweaked their system over time to cover some of the problems I found. But it just does not work on a freshly installed system.
Please, take a fresh machine, install the AIOI, and try those things yourself if you don't believe me.
At least, with the updated LPub3D i get a decent PDF with the LDView renderer.
But the program is still buggy on many aspects. E.g. all measurements are in inches, even if the default unit is cm. A A4 page is 29.7 by 21.0 cm, not 11.6929 by 8.2677 (without any unit given, but it looks like inches) in Configuration->Page Setup.
If there is anything I can do to help debugging this whole mess, ask me, and I'll try my best. If a developer needs my mpd files to fix his software, no problem, just ask, and you will be given. But working with a software suite where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing is utterly frustrating.
Leg bedre,
Christian
I'm really a beginner with all this digital building stuff, but I've learned that ldraw & co can be frustrating to no end.
I started with the all-in-one-installer to create building instructions. I got a lot of help and could get the basics up and running with MLCad (which I had used before to create the models) and LPub3D within a few days. But then it got frustrating. LPub3D produced really, really bad (I'm tempted to say shitty) output. Even when I set the DPI to 600 (and cleared the caches), the PDF was horribly blocky. I finally fixed that by upgrading the provided LPub3D to a more current version. Why does the current all-in-one-installer provide outdated, buggy software?
But even with the updated version, the rendering with LDGLite still just crashes when rendering the model, and I never got the PovRay rendering to work, even after hunting for obscure lg_colors and lg_materials files. The only change I got was that instead of staying open and presenting obscure error messages, it now opens and closes povray without producing anything. It still seems to produce an error of some sorts, but it immediately closes the window, so I cannot tell what the problem is, and the stdout_povray and stderr_povray files are empty.
Hunting for the LGEO library (e.g. to look for updates or to find thoses mysterious lg_colors and lg_materials) files only leads to dead ends - looks like el lutzo closed up shop with his website. Why are those mysterious files (and whatever else may be needed for rendering with PovRay) not part of the all-in-one-installer? I finally found those two files somewhere on sourceforge in another projects archive, but I have absolutely no idea if those are the right ones.
Those rendering problems lead to the idea to use L3P and the L3PAddon to attempt a rendering of the model with PovRay. Sorry, but that was a total failure. The program wants to know the location of some files (which cannot be found within the installation, ldraw files, or program installation directories) and a strange tool (ledit.exe, according to google this is a electric circuit/layout program!?!) that it cannot run at all without.
Maybe this all works for some people who have installed numerous updates over time, have some old files still hanging around from 20 versions ago that some current programs still need, but no installer provides, or have tweaked their system over time to cover some of the problems I found. But it just does not work on a freshly installed system.
Please, take a fresh machine, install the AIOI, and try those things yourself if you don't believe me.
At least, with the updated LPub3D i get a decent PDF with the LDView renderer.
But the program is still buggy on many aspects. E.g. all measurements are in inches, even if the default unit is cm. A A4 page is 29.7 by 21.0 cm, not 11.6929 by 8.2677 (without any unit given, but it looks like inches) in Configuration->Page Setup.
If there is anything I can do to help debugging this whole mess, ask me, and I'll try my best. If a developer needs my mpd files to fix his software, no problem, just ask, and you will be given. But working with a software suite where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing is utterly frustrating.
Leg bedre,
Christian