A way of converting Stud.Io parts to ldraw

[Warren Elsmore]

I'm not sure if anyone has tried this before - I searched but couldn't see anything -  but it might be helpful!

My wife needed 18970 (2x2 plate with scallop) in an ldraw model and it's not in the official or unofficial part tracker. It is, however, in Bricklink so I thought it might be in Stud.Io... and it is. So, to make a quick and dirty conversion, I 

• Opened up Stud.Io and inserted the part, then exported it as a Collada file.
  
• Next, a quick trip to www.meshconvert.com to export it out as .ply
  
• Now, I opened up the .ply in lsculpt* and selected the mesh *only*. No plates export
  
• I had to fiddle with the scale a little (8x, in meters worked for some reason)
  

Hey presto - an .ldr file which I could rename to .dat and put into my unofficial library. 

Now, this almost certainly is not a good approach, and I've no idea on the licensing of Stud.Io parts designs - but it's certainly quick and it does work. Just in case anyone else needs to try it!


*Full disclosure: I used a version of lsculpt that is not generally available. I had a custom version of lsculpt written for our company which we are not intending on releasing for various reasons. But, it's based on the same underlying code so this should still work....

[Philippe Hurbain]

Now, this almost certainly is not a good approach,

Well... interesting method, but needlessly complex
Studio is LDraw based so even though some parts were not sourced from LDraw official or unofficial libraries, they are still provided in LDraw file format. So you can get 18970.dat from C:\Program Files\Studio 2.0\ldraw\UnOfficial\parts (Windows, exact location may differ according to installation...). The mesh itself was extracted from LDD, and is available also from http://www.digital-bricks.de/en/file.php?part=18970
Also note that such parts origin/orientation may not follow LDraw rules, so when the parts are later available from LDraw, this can cause compatibility issues!

Edit: Ulrich cleaned up the part, it's here: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg.../18970.dat

[Warren Elsmore]

Now, this almost certainly is not a good approach,

Well... interesting method, but needlessly complex
Studio is LDraw based so even though some parts were not sourced from LDraw official or unofficial libraries, they are still provided in LDraw file format. So you can get 18970.dat from C:\Program Files\Studio 2.0\ldraw\UnOfficial\parts (Windows, exact location may differ according to installation...). The mesh itself was extracted from LDD, and is available also from http://www.digital-bricks.de/en/file.php?part=18970
Also note that such parts origin/orientation may not follow LDraw rules, so when the parts are later available from LDraw, this can cause compatibility issues!

Edit: Ulrich cleaned up the part, it's here: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg.../18970.dat

Good to know there's a better way of doing it! lol