Newbee looking for basic tool set for part authoring

[Steve Barile]

Hi All,
I'm a long time MLCad, LPub, ... yada yada yada user and pretty familiar with 3D concepts etc… I’m playing around with making custom parts and would like to model first in 3D. I have had limited success with Notepad and MLCad. It’s nice that MLCad can move primitives but sucks that you can’t scale them (at least I don’t know how to scale in MLCad).

Is there an LDraw part authoring tool chain for part dev that is more 1990’s rather than 1970’s text editing! ;-)

Thanks Guys!
SteveB

[Philippe Hurbain]

Hi Steve,

It’s nice that MLCad can move primitives but sucks that you can’t scale them (at least I don’t know how to scale in MLCad).

Well... it's "almost easy" to do... Select the primitive you want to change, and hit the icon "Position & Orientation" (keyboard image icon).

Check "use rotation matrix value" and change any unit values to the dimension you want. The first "1" will scale in x direction, the second Y and the third Z. This assumes that the primitive was not rotated, or only by multiples of 90° around main axis. This can be considered as the "absolute mode". It is more tricky to scale things that have been rotated by random angles. In this case, select the primitive you want to transform AND (using ctrl) any "don't care" thing, either another drawing element that will be scaled the same way, or anything else such as comment line. If you then hit "Position & Orientation", the transformation matrix will always be 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1. Changing any 1 will scale in that direction (relative mode).

Is there an LDraw part authoring tool chain for part dev that is more 1990’s rather than 1970’s text editing! ;-)

Yes and no... - btw, do you know we are already in 2010's ??? ;D
You can use any 3D package that can export to .stl format, and convert that to ldraw with Marc Klein's stl2dat. This tool and a lot of others are included in Michael Heidemann's LETGUI distribution. But it's not so easy to use a 3D package and make proper use of LDraw primitives. That's why I created a bunch of tools (included with LETGUI) to cut/snap/create surfaces and lines at LDraw level.

Hope it helps...

[Steve Barile]

Philippe,
Thanks for the reply! BTW has anyone created a visual direct manipulation primitive scaling app?
SteveB