LDCad 1.2 Beta 1 (win+linux)

[Roland Melkert]

Hello all,

Proudly I would like to present the newest and hopefully greatest version of my LDCad application.

Major new features (compared to 1.1b)

• Flexible parts
  
• Template system
  
• Nested editing
  
• (recursive) Grouping
  

And some minor new features:

• Smoothing of parts
  
• Up to 30% increase of rendering performance.
  
• And of course many small improvements and bugfixes.
  

I also placed some screen recordings on Youtube which should help people get familier with the program more quickly.

Basic editing
This demonstrates the getting started editing basics.

More advanced editing
This introduces using non absolute grids and ortho view mode.

Pneumatic hose placement demo
This demonstrates placement of a pneumatic hose, it also indirectly (minimally) demonstrates the new nested editing mode.


If someone would like to see a clip of some particular activity feel free to ask.

You'll find all available versions at the usual place:
LDCad home page

Any questions and suggestions are welcome.

As usual a nice screen shot of this versions mascot model:


Also as an attachment to this post is the MPD for the above model (8837), which demonstrates you can see the generated pneumatic hoses in any decent LDraw renderer without needing additional parts etc.

This is possible because the flexible parts are (optionally) generated by deforming a donor (segment) LDraw file which is then inlined in the model using special submodels.

I've created some custom donor files for this purpose (pneumatic hose, pf electric wires and technic axle). These files are basicly dressed down versions of official files in order to keep the resulting type 1..5 lines count to a minimum while maintining high quality closed mesh parts.

I know there are many more similar parts people would like to place and 'bend', I will be working to add them in future versions. But this will take me quite some time. So if anyone is interested in helping making additional flexible part (template/donors), let me know and I'll setup some sort of reference document and/or tutorial clip. All this can be done using the 1.2 version it self no scripting/coding is needed it's all based on plain ldr files.

[Orion Pobursky]

Nice. Can't wait to get some free time to try it out.

As far a flexible parts, I'd like to see something for cloth parts. This would be an immense undertaking I'm sure.

[Orion Pobursky]

I forgot to ask and I'm sure that you've answered before but:
If there's a Linux version, an OSX version should be too difficult. Is this a matter of hardware access?

[Roland Melkert]

Cloth generation is on my radar, but I would like to first implement closed loops (rubber bands, closed chains, threads, etc), springs and a minifig generator (universal so it could also generate technic, duplo, friends etc figures based on templates).

But if you have any pointers on how working with cloth could be done efficiently, please let me known. I was thinking in the direction of using stress markers (points) 'pulling' on a flat mesh and defining folding lines etc.

[Roland Melkert]

It should be compilable on a mac given the used gui frontend (wxWidgets) supports it and all the rest is standard C++

But you guessed it right, I don't own a mac. I was planning to look into virtual solutions for that problem, but haven't found the time for it yet.

[Orion Pobursky]

If the source is available somewhere, I'm willing to give it a whirl on my machine.

[Roland Melkert]

For the moment I'm keeping it closed source, but thanks for the offer.

I've read somewhere it should be possible to cross compile using a modified GCC suite (on Linux), so I might try that at some point. Does anyone here have experience with that?

[Roland Melkert]

I'm almost done with testing this beta myself, and want to release a definitive 1.2 version this weekend, as soon as I finish this little project:




Anyhow, If anyone has found some issues or annoyances please let me know before I release the next version, because it will probably be the last for some time.