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SylvainLS

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  1. SylvainLS
    You’re welcome Now you have both a method to build and a reason why Maths are useful in real life. I don’t know why such constructions aren’t used as examples by teachers all over the world!
  2. SylvainLS
    Let’s try with a picture: Place the big White plates. Place the leftmost Black-DBG hinge. Click and rotate the DBG subpart by 21.09°. Place the Red 1x4 plate underneath. Place the LBG-VLBG hinge. Click and rotate the VLBG subpart by 23.91°. Place the Orange 1x4 plate underneath. Clone the LBG-VLBG hinge and put on the rest of the Orange 1x4 plate. Place the Yellow 1x4 plate. Clone the Black-DBG hinge and connect the Yellow 1x4 plate and the right White plate. Now you have a quarter of a hexadecagon. Just clone once to have a half one, and clone the half to close the loop. By the way, the angles are (obviously?) the same if you want longer (or shorter) sides. Here the side is 4 and the polygon has a “diameter” of 22. Side 5 means a “diameter” of 27. (Diameter = 5 x side + 2)
  3. SylvainLS
    Kig is a program, KDE is a desktop environment. You can learn more here. They talk about other similar tools that may exist for Windows. As for the angles: two decimal places is enough, LDD only shows two but you can still enter three or more, LDD doesn’t measure the angles as shown on the construction, instead of 68.9057, you need to use 90 − 69.9057 = 21.0943 (or -21.0943, the sign depends on which subpart of the hinge you’re rotating), and instead of 156.094, you need to use 180 − 156.094 = 23.906. (Again, two decimal places is enough.)
  4. SylvainLS
    These gaps aren’t erroneous, they are mathematical! A regular polygon (same length sides, same angles) with an integer length for the sides doesn’t generally have an integer radius (either for the inscribed circle or the circumscribed circle). When you build it in real life, the hinges adjust themselves and don’t all take the same 157.5° angle. You need to either measure the angles on a real construct (good luck) or find them mathematically. Personally, I use a geometry tool (Kig, under Linux/KDE) and end up with something like this for a 4-stud-sided hexadecagon: The angles you have to use in LDD will be those shown here, or 180° minus angle, or another complement, depending on how the hinge is placed and the angle measured. (Quick explanation of the construct: the points (0,0) and (8,8) are the fixed hinges (the vertical side [(0,-4);(0,0)] and horizontal side [(8,8),(12,8)] are connected with plates, as you wish to do), the hinge points we are looking for are on 4-stud radius circles from these points, the middle diagonal is the center of the middle unconnected side, the other diagonals are its hinge points (the ones we are looking for) and they are at 2 studs on each side, we want that side/segment to be at 45°, we just find the intersections of the diagonals with the circles and find where the hinge points can be (two solutions), and therefore we find the angles. )
  5. SylvainLS
    Use “LDD Extended” mode (menu View / New themes / LDD Extended). A lot of parts, especially new ones, aren’t in the “normal” mode. (Housing is under the “axle/pin” icon, rack under the “gears” icon.)
  6. SylvainLS
    Nah, it just waited for you to post here before disappearing. Trickster-bugs, the naughtiest bugs.
  7. SylvainLS
    It uses LDraw parts models but BrickLink names (for parts and colours). Same step structure. The .io files are (password-protected) zipped LDraw files. And you can easily import and export to LDraw. I don’t use it extensively, I just check where it’s going from time to time, but, yes, it’s heavy on the CPU, at least, I didn’t notice any real improvement on that part, though I’m testing it with Wine on Linux, which might not be the best environment graphics-wise. As to know if your laptop is up to the task, I’d say it’s worth a try (it’s pretty well self-contained and easy to remove otherwise).
  8. SylvainLS
    @NathanR Or you can just wait till the end of July to see if Stud.io’s instruction mode is as good as it looks (Original post / teaser video)
  9. SylvainLS
    Update 2018-06-27 Added: 28220 / 28220.dat Constraction Shell 0.6 x 2 x 3.5 Flat with 2 Bars Corrected: 98606 / 98606.dat Dish 9 x 9 Inverted with Pin Hole (has been inverted) md5sum: aa6654c6830c17990e676390343af6e6
  10. SylvainLS
    Update 2018-06-26 Added: 98606 / 98606.dat Dish 9 x 9 with Pin Hole Corrected (LDraw modified in Unofficial): 11103 / 11103.dat Minifig Sword Double Blade with Bar Holder Rematched: 74880 / 74880.dat Electric Light & Sound Brick 1 x 2 with Single Side Light (was 6035.dat, now made importable) md5sum: bda1a5e315d48f935af4c23d1f47072e
  11. SylvainLS
    (Re)Move the baseplate, put the bricks that should join the baseplates, add the baseplate back, it will connect with the bricks and be at the right height / the same height as the other baseplates. You can then remove the bricks if you don’t want them (in that case, they are called “scaffolding bricks”: they just serve to place other parts). The “ground” is where the lowest part is. If you have parts lying around that are below the baseplates, any new baseplate will go on their level, not the other baseplates’ level. It’s easy to have this problem. Putting parts on the ground, unconnected, will often lead to this. When you do complex builds, you need to remember to connect your parts (as it’s done in official instructions for instance), not put two parts way apart and then hope the parts you pile on each side will then gently connect when they meet. They should connect but, as you experienced, sometimes they don’t because you forgot one part somewhere or miscalutated or a part was misplaced or rotated and it moved the ground down.
  12. SylvainLS
    Er, twenty years will be enough
  13. SylvainLS
    This link works: link
  14. SylvainLS
    Sunflow is open source but it’s only a library for Bluerender. Bluerender itself has no explicit licence, therefore it’s proprietary, a freeware, a donationware (pick the one you understand the best). Anything that is not granted is forbidden. (Even the right to use the program is only implied, by its availability, but not stated.)
  15. SylvainLS
    Hi @Danielle82 and welcome. First, “LDraw” is (now) a format, not a software, so to help you further, we’d need to know which particular application you’re using (LDCAD, LeoCAD, MLCAD…). As for your problem, within the LDraw format, you have to define which parts go into which step. If you just export/import an LDD/LXF file, the resulting LDraw file will only have one step, with all the parts. That’s why you only get one page when generating a HTML document. So the first step (pun not intended) is to create steps inside your LDraw file and move parts into these steps.
  16. SylvainLS
    Yes, and then corrected them when some joints were too loose or some parts eventually didn’t fit
  17. SylvainLS
    It also offers bricks as they don’t exist. Nonetheless, I found Standard Mode’s way of presenting colours as a choice in a subdialog way better than Extended’s (so many clicks to choose or change colours). It’s a pity LEGO didn’t add the new parts to Standard.
  18. SylvainLS
    Thank you for these smooth years at the wheel. And congrats to Legolijntjes and Holodoc for the promotion!
  19. SylvainLS
    Oops, sorry, didn’t check all the participants
  20. SylvainLS
    Yes, there’s a CustomParts folder where you can copy your own parts. There are two important messages about it on the dedicated forum: http://forum.bricklink.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=821&p=2238&hilit=customparts&sid=a0487a9d7213c77248f4ce56001e5072#p2238 http://forum.bricklink.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=965&p=2615&hilit=customparts&sid=a0487a9d7213c77248f4ce56001e5072#p2615 Never tried myself….
  21. SylvainLS
    They can go wrong because of file system corruption or bugs but the structure is simple so bugs are limited. The file is read, the objects (parts, connections…) are created in memory, the file is forgotten, you modify the model, you save it, the info is written from memory to the file. The only thing that stays from your construction process is the order of the parts: a model is “just” a list of parts, each new part is added at the end of the list, so the list is chronological by construction. And, when read, all the info is checked (e.g. for collision) or (re)created. For instance, connections and articulation points aren’t mandatory, so they are simply created if they are not present in the file. I’m sure they are at least verified. That takes time. I don’t know of any way to flush LDD’s cache, even in Developer mode. Anyway, that wouldn’t serve when loading a file just after having launched LDD: every thing that is put in memory is needed for the model.
  22. SylvainLS
    An LXF file isn’t a Word™ file It doesn’t get “messed up” with time. The information is pretty straightforward: parts, their positions, colours, decors, their connections, the hinges, the groups. There’s no history or timeline or temporary data in there. It’s clean. What’s making LDD slow down is the number of bricks and colours and, especially, decors, you have viewed (not necessarily used: browsing is sufficient). It fills up the memory, and LDD is 32bits, so its memory usage is limited.
  23. SylvainLS
    Update 2018-06-08 Added: 11103 / 11103.dat Minifig Sword Double Blade with Bar Holder 21301 / 21301.dat Boat 5 x 14 x 2 without Front Side Bar Holders 24196 / 24196.dat Animal Dragon Head Elves 24199 / 24199.dat Animal Dragon Head Elves Lower Jaw 30202 / 30202.dat Minifig Helmet Underwater Stingray Renamed: 3614 / 3614a.dat Plate 1 x 1 Round with Towball Importable: 3614.dat ~Plate 1 x 1 Round with Towball (Obsolete) md5sum: 9f60e4a9dec7012297c1b68bdb8c8d9e
  24. SylvainLS
    They have been removed from standard LDD when they were split in two full parts (way easier to build the Taj Mahal ;)). Before, they were an assembly (like hips+legs or hinges). The last updates have seen the removal of colour information for some pieces, the results being these pieces aren’t available in standard LDD anymore, only in Extended, or in very few colours.
  25. SylvainLS
    I’m not sure how it’s read but the space in the filepath might be the problem so I’d try enclosing the filepath in double quotes.
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