LDView 4.2 POV-Ray export

[Michael Horvath]

I am having problems with LDView POV-Ray export.

I have set the view in LDView to "Zoom to Fit". In the export dialog I set the aspect ratio to "4:3". The rendered image in POV-Ray is clipped at the sides. Shouldn't the building "fit" inside the render dimensions automatically?

Thanks.

[Michael Horvath]

One more issue, the lighting is not being exported properly.

You can see that the light and dark regions don't match up in the two images.

[Travis Cobbs]

You have to select a 4:3 aspect ratio option from the View->Standard Sizes menu before you zoom to fit and perform the export. The export uses LDView's current camera location, pointing direction and field of view. However, the shape of the LDView window will determine how things are cropped in it vs. the POV export. If you compare the generated file with your image in the window, you will see that the camera matches. It's just that your LDView window is wider than 4:3.

[Travis Cobbs]

You are correct. LDView generates a static set of three lights in its POV exports. These won't match the lighting in LDView itself. Unfortunately, due to my decreasing work on LDView, it's very unlikely there will ever be an option to generate POV lights that match the LDView lighting.

[Travis Cobbs]

One more thing. This is in fact alluded to in the LDView help file. I have put a lot of effort into trying to make the help file useful. If you search it for "aspect", it talks about using standard sizes for POV exports and POV camera info. It doesn't spell out the details of why you should do this, which is probably bad, but I think a lot of people would have gotten the answer to the question by reading what's there.

[Michael Horvath]

Okay thanks.

[Michael Horvath]

How do you do LGEO part substitution in LDView? There are tooltips in the POV export options menu that are confusing, and nothing in the Help file.

In the "Native POV geometry" section, the tooltip says, "If you check this, you can put POV include files in a POV subdirectory of your POV directory and have LDView use those as replacements for part files." Do you mean "POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory"?

What do these POV INC files look like inside? How do I make this setting work with the LGEO library?

Also, it is not explained in the Help file what an XML mapping file is. What is it and where do I get one?

[Travis Cobbs]

How do you do LGEO part substitution in LDView? There are tooltips in the POV export options menu that are confusing, and nothing in the Help file.

In the "Native POV geometry" section, the tooltip says, "If you check this, you can put POV include files in a POV subdirectory of your POV directory and have LDView use those as replacements for part files." Do you mean "POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory"?

What do these POV INC files look like inside? How do I make this setting work with the LGEO library?

Also, it is not explained in the Help file what an XML mapping file is. What is it and where do I get one?

Yes, it was supposed to say POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory. The idea there is that you create one POV include file for each part. The POV file would be named the same as the part filename, but with .inc instead of .dat as its extension. Inside that POV file, you would have the POV geometry for the part. LDView would search the file for a #declare, and treat the first #declare as the name of the part in POV.

At one point in time, there was a project to create these .inc files, and I think there was even thought of making it an official part of LDraw. However, (IIRC) it was decided that it would be inappropriate to make it official, and I think whoever was working on it abandoned it. You can find what was made here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ldrawpov/

If you want to make your own parts, you can use the inc files from the above project as examples.

This is totally independent of LGEO. Essentially, you would create these files for parts that don't exist in LGEO (or parts where you don't like the LGEO definition).

Originally I planned to make different mapping files for different libraries. However, Anton Raves abandoned his library, and there weren't really any others, so the only file that was created was LGEO.xml, which is part of the LDView installation. Other people (like C3POwen on Eurobrikcs) have enhanced LGEO.xml. I never really intended other people to create these files, but if you look inside LGEO.xml (in the LDView install directory), you may be able to figure out how it works. Note that it's been so long since I worked on that that I don't even remember how it works. If you don't specify a file, LDView uses LGEO.xml from the LDView install directory. So, to answer the question of "How do you do LGEO part substitution," LDView uses the contents of LGEO.xml to do that.

At one point L3P-compatible inline POV statements were included in some official parts. I believe that was made illegal in the official parts spec. That check box was designed to have LDView pay attention to these statements. I don't remember what the format was (other than that they were type 0 comment lines), but if you're going to be creating custom POV for parts, the POV replacement .inc files route is definitely much better than manually editing your official LDraw parts.

[Michael Horvath]

Yes, it was supposed to say POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory.

Which LDraw directory? The one in Program Files or the one in Public Documents? There are two nowadays.

[Travis Cobbs]

Yes, it was supposed to say POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory.

Which LDraw directory? The one in Program Files or the one in Public Documents? There are two nowadays.

The LDraw directory is the location of the LDraw parts library. It's perfectly valid for there to be lots of directories on your computer named "ldraw", but only one of them is "the LDraw directory". LDView has a setting that you can set (in the file menu) for the LDraw directory. Wherever that points is the LDraw directory.

[Michael Horvath]

Yes, it was supposed to say POV subdirectory of your LDraw directory.

Which LDraw directory? The one in Program Files or the one in Public Documents? There are two nowadays.

The LDraw directory is the location of the LDraw parts library. It's perfectly valid for there to be lots of directories on your computer named "ldraw", but only one of them is "the LDraw directory". LDView has a setting that you can set (in the file menu) for the LDraw directory. Wherever that points is the LDraw directory.

I ask because the AIOI installs the LGEO files in the "Program Files\LDraw" directory, which is not where the LDraw parts are located.

[Travis Cobbs]

I ask because the AIOI installs the LGEO files in the "Program Files\LDraw" directory, which is not where the LDraw parts are located.

Any place that LDView refers to the LDraw directory, it's referring to the directory that holds the LDraw Parts Library (parent directory of p, parts, and models).

I looked at the source code, and it turns out I was wrong about putting the .inc files in <LDraw dir>/POV. LDView actually looks in <LDraw dir>/pov/p and <LDraw dir>/pov/parts. Putting a file in <LDraw dir>/pov won't work. So if you create 3001.inc, it needs to be <LDraw dir>/pov/parts/3001.inc.

[Orion Pobursky]

At one point in time, there was a project to create these .inc files, and I think there was even thought of making it an official part of LDraw. However, (IIRC) it was decided that it would be inappropriate to make it official, and I think whoever was working on it abandoned it. You can find what was made here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ldrawpov/

If you want to make your own parts, you can use the inc files from the above project as examples.

This is totally independent of LGEO. Essentially, you would create these files for parts that don't exist in LGEO (or parts where you don't like the LGEO definition).

I'm the admin of the above project and I recently moved it to github:
https://github.com/billthefish/LDrawPOV

It hasn't been updated it years but if you want to contribute then the standards are set forth in the standards.txt file. Note that this project is all CSG with no meshes allowed. When, or if, I ever get back to this project I'll probably require textures for patterned parts as well.

[Michael Horvath]

I'm the admin of the above project and I recently moved it to github:
https://github.com/billthefish/LDrawPOV

It hasn't been updated it years but if you want to contribute then the standards are set forth in the standards.txt file. Note that this project is all CSG with no meshes allowed. When, or if, I ever get back to this project I'll probably require textures for patterned parts as well.

Can these be used alongside the LGEO parts? Is this inadvisable?

[Orion Pobursky]

I'm the admin of the above project and I recently moved it to github:
https://github.com/billthefish/LDrawPOV

It hasn't been updated it years but if you want to contribute then the standards are set forth in the standards.txt file. Note that this project is all CSG with no meshes allowed. When, or if, I ever get back to this project I'll probably require textures for patterned parts as well.

Can these be used alongside the LGEO parts? Is this inadvisable?

I think so? Not sure since the L3P version that Lars wrote to allowthe use of these parts was never released and I got busy doing other things.