X581C01.DAT (Electric Motor Case 4 x 12 x 3.333 Type 2 (Shortcut))

[Christoph Mierowski]

I get an LDView error when displaing this part:

error loading submodel X581S02.dat

and the same with X581S01.dat

The part looks completly fine in editors (like SR 3D Builder)
Is that an LDView or a LDraw (part) issue?

If this is a LDView error only, this post can be moved to the LDraw Editors and Viewers subforum..

[Travis Cobbs]

I just downloaded the main part from the tracker into my Unofficial/Parts directory, then opened the file without errors or warnings. LDView automatically downloaded the sub-files (including x581s01.dat and x581d02.dat) from ldraw.org while loading the file. I checked the dates, and both those sub-files were created today, so neither pre-existed on my hard drive. I did all this with the official LDView 4.1 release running on a Mac, but I wouldn't expect the results to be any different on Windows.

Note also that the Parts Tracker itself uses a Linux command line build of LDView to display parts on the tracker (with auto-downloads disabled), and the part image for the part looks correct. Philo did say that ldraw.org was unreachable for a while recently. LDView will disable automatic downloads of unofficial parts if it has network problems while attempting to do so. Check the Updates tab of LDView's preferences, and see if "Automatically check ldraw.org for missing parts" got unchecked.

[Christoph Mierowski]

you're right. When I'm opening x581c01.dat directly with LDView, it is shown correctly. But if I choose it in SR 3D Builder (in which it is shown correctly, too) then save it and then open the savefile in LDView, I get these errors.

I attached the savefile....

[Travis Cobbs]

It appears to be a bug in SR 3D Builder. The s\ has been stripped from in front of the sub-parts, which makes the file invalid. If the file loads in SR 3D Builder, then it could be argued that SR 3D Builder's file loading code also has a bug, since the parts\s\ subdirectory should not be part of the LDraw search path. (Having said that, if the program is generating files like this, then it's not necessarily a bug that should be fixed, since that would break pre-existing files even if the file saving bug is fixed.)

Also, SR 3D Builder may not support using sub-models from a sub-directory, in which case the whole thing isn't really a bug so much as a missing feature. I assume that you loaded the shortcut in SR 3D Builder directly, instead of loading an LDR file that contained the shortcut. If you add the shortcut (x581c01.dat) to an LDR file, and then load that LDR file in SR 3D Builder, I suspect that everything will be fine when you save, since only x581c01.dat would then show up in the file created by SR 3D Builder, and not the components that make it up.

If you just want to view the file on your machine in LDView, you can probably get around the problem by adding the <LDraw>/Parts/s and <LDraw>/Unofficial/Parts/s directories to LDView's search path. Do this by using the Extra Dirs menu item in the File menu.