OSX Tools

[Opie S. Teller]

I am a Mac user (OSX 10.13.6 High Sierra) and I am going to upgrade to OSX Catalina eventually, but I'm waiting on that.
In the meantime, I am practically certifiable in the latest version of Lego Digital Designer. However, I've never been quite satisfied with its semi-lack of the newest useful bricks (I have no care for the gimmick pieces), as well as old lost-to-time bricks. I have gone on a download bonanza for the past hour and a half since I found out that LDraw is a thing. I also noticed that many of these things cut off at OSX Snow Leopard at the latest, so… yeah. I'm wondering if anybody here knows the MOST UPDATED and LEAST BUGGY software that operates similarly to LDD but through LDraw.
I was relieved to find that there were recent posts on this forum.
Which of these compressed files (on the attached image) are most necessary, and/or which ones would be completely useless to me?
[attachment=4161] https://forums.ldraw.org/attachment.php?aid=4161

[Orion Pobursky]

I am a Mac user (OSX 10.13.6 High Sierra) and I am going to upgrade to OSX Catalina eventually, but I'm waiting on that.
In the meantime, I am practically certifiable in the latest version of Lego Digital Designer. However, I've never been quite satisfied with its semi-lack of the newest useful bricks (I have no care for the gimmick pieces), as well as old lost-to-time bricks. I have gone on a download bonanza for the past hour and a half since I found out that LDraw is a thing. I also noticed that many of these things cut off at OSX Snow Leopard at the latest, so… yeah. I'm wondering if anybody here knows the MOST UPDATED and LEAST BUGGY software that operates similarly to LDD but through LDraw.
I was relieved to find that there were recent posts on this forum.
Which of these compressed files (on the attached image) are most necessary, and/or which ones would be completely useless to me?
 https://forums.ldraw.org/attachment.php?aid=4161

It's a bad time for LDraw and MacOS. Bricksmith, the best LDraw editor for MacOS and one that I personally used for years, has some issues with Mojave+. Compounding this is that fact that the developer has withdrawn from active development and the people who took over haven't issued a new, working release. That being said, I have heard that people are having success getting LDCad to run under WINE.

To sum up, if you are on High Sierra or less, check out Bricksmith, it's great. Once you upgrade then there may be issues.

[Eric Guo]

I am a Mac user (OSX 10.13.6 High Sierra) and I am going to upgrade to OSX Catalina eventually, but I'm waiting on that.
In the meantime, I am practically certifiable in the latest version of Lego Digital Designer. However, I've never been quite satisfied with its semi-lack of the newest useful bricks (I have no care for the gimmick pieces), as well as old lost-to-time bricks. I have gone on a download bonanza for the past hour and a half since I found out that LDraw is a thing. I also noticed that many of these things cut off at OSX Snow Leopard at the latest, so… yeah. I'm wondering if anybody here knows the MOST UPDATED and LEAST BUGGY software that operates similarly to LDD but through LDraw.
I was relieved to find that there were recent posts on this forum.
Which of these compressed files (on the attached image) are most necessary, and/or which ones would be completely useless to me?
 https://forums.ldraw.org/attachment.php?aid=4161

From my experience using both, Bricklink Studio operates as close to LDD as any modern software is going to get. According to the website, it's compatible with OSX.  BL Studio also has its own "parts designer" app that allows you to import LDraw .dat files if the official Studio library doesn't have the part yet, as well as a proprietary GPU renderer. It's supported as a service of the Bricklink site, and so it should be around for a while.

Mecabricks.com is a web-based LCAD software. I don't use it but I've skimmed it a bit due to FOMO. The way you move bricks is noticeably different, to the point where they really emphasize it in the tutorial. However, you can add light sources and volumetrics in-app, something that you would have to add post-process in other software. The dev monetizes it by renting access to a pre-configured render farm, and based on his twitter feed he's pretty active in keeping it up to date, for now.

Ah, the burden of choice! Hope this helps.

[N. W. Perry]

Fellow Mac user here, and I went through all of the same issues finding tools I could work with (except that I never really spent any time on LDD, as it was already surpassed by other programs by the time I became interested). Bricksmith was my editor of choice for a while, and I can say that it still works just fine for me under Mojave; I've not noticed any issues with running the program on my system. But Bricksmith is admittedly not a full-featured editor, and as noted, is no longer actively supported.

With the release of Studio, I found my interest renewed. The program allows for easy building with quick visual feedback, and is fairly powerful as far as what it can achieve. At the same time, there's really no way to work "under the hood" in Studio, meaning that if one of the program's features comes up short of what you want it to do, there's really no recourse but to submit a bug report or feature request and wait (hope) for their dev team to notice and act on it. (I'm looking at you, flexible parts engine…) 

It also means that you can't get in and do any really precise manual tweaking or positioning of parts, so you have to work in a true LDraw editor for that. On Mac, that means Bricksmith (and it also means exporting from Studio's proprietary .io file format to .ldr and back again).

However, I'd also read about people being able to use LDCad under Wine, so I finally gave in and tried that—it worked! And it was not actually as tricky to set up as I thought: I found a very clear and concise online tutorial for setting up Wine, and as for LDCad itself, the only thing I had to do was install certain fonts used by the GUI. Other than that, the biggest hindrance is the difference in the physical interface between PCs and Macs (lack of a scroll wheel and—very notably—an Insert key), but that can be worked around. In short, getting LDCad up and running has really opened up the world of possibility for me as far as what LDraw can do—I no longer need Bricksmith at all, and I only go back into Studio for its fantastic photoreal rendering engine.

Oh, and I should add that LDCad is especially well supported by the outstanding help offered by the community here, both from the program's own developer, and other highly accomplished LDraw users.

[Orion Pobursky]

A quick side note on this:
While Studio is a perfectly capable editor, it is not completely LDraw compatible. For this reason, it'll never be officially endorsed by LDraw.org.

Additionally, I, personally, will not endorse any editor that is not open source or promised to be (in the case of LDCad).

[Opie S. Teller]

However, I'd also read about people being able to use LDCad under Wine, so I finally gave in and tried that—it worked! And it was not actually as tricky to set up as I thought: I found a very clear and concise online tutorial for setting up Wine…

That's very encouraging, thanks! Would you mind locating that tutorial for me? I've had an impossibly hard time trying to configure Wine.

However:
Thank you everyone for all the input, but that doesn't exactly answer my question entirely…
   
I included an image on the post, but it didn't appear as an image, so I'm going to have to ask: Of the things I have downloaded (for there are many) which should I not attempt to install (which ones would be a waste of virtual space and valuable time)?

[N. W. Perry]

That's very encouraging, thanks! Would you mind locating that tutorial for me? I've had an impossibly hard time trying to configure Wine.

This was the tutorial: https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/

[Roland Melkert]

This was the tutorial: https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/

For LDCad, You might also need to install 'winetricks' using brew to ensure needed fonts are available.

Might not be needed anymore with newer wine versions though (Normally LDCad gets those font files directly from the c:\windows\fonts location, which used to be incomplete on wine)

Alternative would be to copy specific font files into the (%appdata%/LDCad) "gui/default" location, namely:

DejaVuSans, FreeSans or verdana  for normal text and DejaVuSansMono, FreeMono or cour for mono spaced ones. The bold ones being freely available on the net.

[N. W. Perry]

For LDCad, You might also need to install 'winetricks' using brew to ensure needed fonts are available.

Might not be needed anymore with newer wine versions though (Normally LDCad gets those font files directly from the c:\windows\fonts location, which used to be incomplete on wine)

Alternative would be to copy specific font files into the (%appdata%/LDCad) "gui/default" location, namely:

DejaVuSans, FreeSans or verdana  for normal text and DejaVuSansMono, FreeMono or cour for mono spaced ones. The bold ones being freely available on the net.

The alternative was enough for me; I didn't find the need to install winetricks, but I did have to locate the font files.

[Eric Guo]

A quick side note on this:
While Studio is a perfectly capable editor, it is not completely LDraw compatible. For this reason, it'll never be officially endorsed by LDraw.org.

Additionally, I, personally, will not endorse any editor that is not open source or promised to be (in the case of LDCad).

Interesting! I hope my endorsement of Studio didn't cause any offense, and sorry if it did.

[Orion Pobursky]

Interesting! I hope my endorsement of Studio didn't cause any offense, and sorry if it did.

I'm cool with all things LDraw. I use Studio all the time for rendering. In fact, I recommend it as a beginner LDraw editor. However, since it doesn't completely conform to the spec, it's not truly LDraw compatible and won't get the official LDraw.org recommendation.

[N. W. Perry]

Thank you everyone for all the input, but that doesn't exactly answer my question entirely…

I included an image on the post, but it didn't appear as an image, so I'm going to have to ask: Of the things I have downloaded (for there are many) which should I not attempt to install (which ones would be a waste of virtual space and valuable time)?

I recognize that this part of the question remains unanswered—for my part, I can't really advise, since I recognize very few of those files. The only things from this bunch that I have installed are Bricksmith and LSynth, plus of course the LDraw library itself. (And then I have LDCad, in lieu of MLCad—and that more or less supersedes Bricksmith and LSynth since it has the functionality of both, with more active support.) However, LDView and LPub are both referred to frequently by other users, so you may well find them useful to install, too.

[Leonardo Zide]

LeoCAD is still maintained and works on OSX, you only need the dmg file from https://www.leocad.org/download.html if you want to try it out.

[Jaco van der Molen]

LeoCAD is still maintained and works on OSX, you only need the dmg file from https://www.leocad.org/download.html if you want to try it out.

Hi Leonardo,

A question not directely related to this topic, but Leocad related: can you make the "building floor" invisible? I hope you know what I mean by that, but I cannot come up with another name or term for it.

Jaco

[Philippe Hurbain]

A question not directely related to this topic, but Leocad related: can you make the "building floor" invisible? I hope you know what I mean by that, but I cannot come up with another name or term for it.

Yes you can... View -> preferences -> rendering (? - second tab), uncheck studs and lines in base grid.
...which brings another question: is it possible to change Leocad language? mine speaks French, which makes difficult to answer questions in English!

[Jaco van der Molen]

Yes you can... View -> preferences -> rendering (? - second tab), uncheck studs and lines in base grid.
...which brings another question: is it possible to change Leocad language? mine speaks French, which makes difficult to answer questions in English!

OK, got. Thanks.

Is there a limit BTW to the amount of pieces LeoCad can load? I have a 15.000+ brick model with 200+ submodels, and LeoCad is not loading it complete.
It only loads the first 24 submodels? And less then half the model?

[Philippe Hurbain]

OK, got. Thanks.

Is there a limit BTW to the amount of pieces LeoCad can load? I have a 15.000+ brick model with 200+ submodels, and LeoCad is not loading it complete.
It only loads the first 24 submodels? And less then half the model?

Limit seems further away. I loaded a scene composed of several huge technic models, totalling more than 30k parts and 600 submodels, it loaded fine. Leocad was still quite responsive (of course loading did take some time, about 10 seconds).
Win7/64bit, 8Gb memory.

[Leonardo Zide]

Yes you can... View -> preferences -> rendering (? - second tab), uncheck studs and lines in base grid.
...which brings another question: is it possible to change Leocad language? mine speaks French, which makes difficult to answer questions in English!

There isn't a way to do that currently, it just gets the current language from the system.