LDView 3DS export

[Michael Horvath]

I am trying to export a model in 3DS format using LDView. However, when I view the model in Meshlab, it looks very messed up with missing faces and holes and so forth. Is this an issue with LDView or Meshlab do you think? Thanks.

[Orion Pobursky]

I am trying to export a model in 3DS format using LDView. However, when I view the model in Meshlab, it looks very messed up with missing faces and holes and so forth. Is this an issue with LDView or Meshlab do you think? Thanks.

I don't think we're at 100% coverage for BFC in the library so this may be a problem with expected face winding.

[Philippe Hurbain]

I don't think we're at 100% coverage for BFC in the library so this may be a problem with expected face winding.

This is not the only problem, even a single 2x4 brick shows missing stuff (eg. cylinder around studs) even though it is fully bfced.

[Roland Melkert]

I don't think we're at 100% coverage for BFC in the library so this may be a problem with expected face winding.

This is not the only problem, even a single 2x4 brick shows missing stuff (eg. cylinder around studs) even though it is fully bfced.

Maybe it expects everything to be CCW

[Travis Cobbs]

This is not the only problem, even a single 2x4 brick shows missing stuff (eg. cylinder around studs) even though it is fully bfced.

Maybe it expects everything to be CCW

It's supposed to support full BFC, but I have had nothing but problems with the 3DS format. It seems like every 3DS-supporting program behaves differently with 3DS files, so that when I test with some program and everything looks great, that does not in fact mean that the files are correct, just that the one program I tested with was OK with them. And since I'm never going to pay for 3DS Max, I can't even claim that the files I generate work there.

Having said that, my 3DS exporter is known to produce bad output with non-BFC-certified geometry, because back-face culling isn't optional in 3DS.

[Leonardo Zide]

Having said that, my 3DS exporter is known to produce bad output with non-BFC-certified geometry, because back-face culling isn't optional in 3DS.

I think that's what CHK_MAT_TWO_SIDE is for, but it's been a while since I last looked at 3DS.

[Travis Cobbs]

Having said that, my 3DS exporter is known to produce bad output with non-BFC-certified geometry, because back-face culling isn't optional in 3DS.

I think that's what CHK_MAT_TWO_SIDE is for, but it's been a while since I last looked at 3DS.

Thanks. It's been a long time since I looked at my 3DS, and it appears that I'm setting that to 1 for all of my materials (which probably isn't ideal, but implies that this isn't the cause of the missing faces).

[Travis Cobbs]

I am trying to export a model in 3DS format using LDView. However, when I view the model in Meshlab, it looks very messed up with missing faces and holes and so forth. Is this an issue with LDView or Meshlab do you think? Thanks.

If you import the 3DS file from LDView into Blender, and then export it from Blender to 3DS, MeshLab seems to be happy. For me, Blender took an exceedingly long time to load the 3DS file from LDView, and an even longer time to export the 3DS file, but it did work.

[Steffen]

I don't think we're at 100% coverage for BFC in the library

In the official one, not yet, but we are 99.9% there...:
All remaining non-BFCed parts are on the PT now, which is very cool IMHO.
This means that, as soon as these get official, also the official library will be 100% BFCed.
What a milestone!

http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptbfcstatus.cgi