Smoothing and BFC problems in LDview

[Mikkel Bech Jensen]

I am (sort of) new to parts authoring and I've been trying to learn what there is to know about making parts for ldraw. I can't seem to make curves and rounded objects to look smooth in LDview. I have read alot about how edge lines and conditional/optional lines work, and I have successfully made them with Edger2 through LETGUI. I assumed (for what I read from http://www.philohome.com/isecalc/edger2.htm ) that LDview smoothes surfaces with condlines automatically, but since I can see that there are condlines and LDview doesn't smooth the surface I guess I was wrong? They only make an outline.

Another question I have, when I make quads and triangles in MLCAD they won't be coloured green/red when I press the BFC button in LDview. The same happens when I export a part as primitives in MLCAD. This has annoyed me for a long time.

Ps. If I import a DAT file that has been exported as primitives from MLCAD, as a template in LDPatternCreator, LDPC crashes when I export the patterned version.

[Mikkel Bech Jensen]

I should propably also mention that I used the 2-8sphe.dat, from the official 'p' library, to test if I could make conitional lines with Edger2. I exported it as "LDRAW Primitives" from MLCAD and deleted the existing edge & condlines from the part.

[Philippe Hurbain]

Hi Mikkel,
Nice to see a new part author!
As for the LDView/smoothing issue, I think that the problem you have is that the file MUST have a valid part type to trigger LDView smoothing:

Code:

0 !LDRAW_ORG Unofficial_Part

Subpart type doesn't trigger smoothing directly either, except if they are called by a part.

Your BFC problem is probably similar, you must have a "0 BFC CERTIFY CCW" statement in your file header to see direct/inverted triangles and quads (primitives "carry on" their own BFC statement and are seen green/red even if the file that calls them has no BFC statement). Not sure what you mean with "The same happens when I export a part as primitives in MLCAD"

Not sure either what's your LDPC problem, can you post the .lpc here?

[Mikkel Bech Jensen]

Ahh, I see

When I export a part into primitives (something you can do in MLCAD) so all the subparts are broken down to to there quads and triangles, you couldn't see the BFC in LDview. I don't know if that was any clearer, but I know what the problem was now

I have attached the .lpc to this post. It still crashes when I export it, but I have managed to export it by copy and pasting all the vertices into a new .lpc without a template (as you can see with the attached .dat file).

[Mikkel Bech Jensen]

And here is the part I used. It's a disc exported from MLCAD to easily the the right size

[Gerald Lasser]

Your LPC does not crash at my machine (LPC V1.5.7 and Win7E). I have some issues with LDPC crashing occasionally as well. Usually I then open the file again and straight ahead export it again, then it works. I never had files that crashed twice, respectivley files I could not export. The may crash indeed multiple times, but onyl if I load them, edit them and export them. Loading and straight exporting works till now always.

Regarding templates for LDPC see this post which describes the handling (for a more complicated shape)

[Philippe Hurbain]

No crash here either...