Jump to content

roland

Eurobricks Citizen
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    372

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by roland

  1. roland
    Don't forget to include '.ldr' in the getRef line. The getRef function needs the literal name of the (Nth) used part you want to link to, the easiest way to get that name is by copying it from the properties window (like i do in the second animation tutorial youtube clip.) If that link fails (part not found) it will cause the mentioned error on the first usage attempt (setOri in this case).
  2. roland
    The setOri fails because the ax1 variable isn't set as 'axle1' is not found. You must use local ax1=mainSf:getRef('axel1.ldr') Also to rotate the gear axle you'll need to rotate around the z axis: setRotate(angle, 0, 0, 1) Hope this gets you back on track :)
  3. roland
    Yes. If you want you can already play with it using the Alpha version, the only big difference with the upcoming beta is the POV-Ray export I'm currently working on. http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/nextVer Use ctrl right click drag for region select.
  4. roland
    Region select is available in the upcoming 1.6 version, it will always select everything inside though. You can also use the source window to select things in bulk or at obstructed places.
  5. roland
    If you are using LDView or LDCad to export the OpenGL rendering a common trick is to export in high resolution (e.g. UHD) and then use a quality image resize tool (e.g. irfanview) to scale it to something smaller. This usually results better edge lines. Doing this with or without AA might influence things too.
  6. roland
    All normals seem inverted, maybe all that is needed is a (left/right hand) coordinate system correction.
  7. roland
    Usually it is easier to download the entire unofficial library http://www.ldraw.org/article/14.html and add it to your editor's search paths.
  8. roland
    A static ground base was planned for 1.6 but I dropped it in favor of other features. I might add it in a future version though. You detached the part bin window, holddown ctrl while draging the window to dock it again. yes: http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/docs
  9. roland
    Don't worry about that too much, all feedback is welcome.Some corrections / 'excuses' on your cons: You can also use the ins key to add new parts, it will add the last used / clicked part in the current color. A base plate can be placed like any other part. I myself consider placement freedom a pro, part snapping is off by default because I'm in the process of adding the needed snapping info to parts as they are not standard LDraw information. While not everything has that info, placement might be very confusing to new users. This is why in the documentation I explain grid placement first Color can be assigned to the selection by pressing the first rectangle below the color wheel which indicates the current 'working' color. I still don't think the graphics are 'bad', but I'm interested in what aspect you consider bad? The gui is the way it is because I like it myself and it's drawn fully using OpenGL so I kept it simple for now. Sorting is done based on the LDraw part descriptions, if you want custom sorting / bins you can design your own bin content if needed. You can rotate a part in the bin by holding ctrl
  10. roland
    I think It's fairly comparable when using OpenGL >=3.0 and msaa enabled LDCad uses LDraw which has over 8000 parts, you can specific ones on LDraw.org 's part tracker. Placement wise anything goes, but there is a basic optional part snapping tool. Snapping is not at the level of LDD though. I'm not 100% sure but I think LDCad is faster then LDD (imho) model size is basically only limited by vga speed. Biggest I've loaded and edited was ~130 thousand parts (at ~5fps on a Radeon 7950),
  11. roland
    1.6 will offer to create an unoffical part subfile instead of a submodel if scaling and or line geometry is detected in the selection.while using the 'reorganize/move to subfile..' option. You can also use the new header fields available in 1.6 to change a model into a part but it will require a file reload afterwards.
  12. roland
    Technical reason: Each part in LDCad has been flattened geometry wise in order to allow for fast rendering, scaling/mirroring will (also) affect the containing normals and thus mess with the lighting. Workaround: Put the slope part with its scaled sticker in a new .dat containing a "0 UNOFFICIAL PART" line. This will make it a new part which will be flattened separately and thus render correctly.
  13. roland
    1.6 Alpha 4 seems to be very stable as I haven't received or found any real issues as of yet. So there is probably no harm in using it instead of 1.5 just keep some backups handy (which is good habit anyway.)I don't recommend using it combined with a 1.5 setup though as the next version might not be backwards compatible with the alpha, I only maintain backwards compatibility with the 1.5 version (this is the reason 1.6 Alpha's don't have a setup).
  14. roland
    If you drew this model in LDCad you probably used the wrong part bin(s) or enabled inclusion for them in the general search bin. Because the '_','~' and '=' parts are not shown in the main part bins because of the reason SylcainLS mentioned. These parts are usually leftovers from past changes made to the library and or use alternative (colored) part numbers. The _ and = parts can be fixed using LDCad 1.6 if you don't mind using an alpha version. By selecting them followed by right mouse click -> reorganize\remove redirects.Or by using the file\clean up tool (check all redirects). Be sure to make a backup of the original file first.
  15. roland
    Thanks for the info and alternative .pov's I'm not sure about ambiant/emission thing, from the povray helpfile: This is why I switched to emission, it works quite well until you add a sky sphere. I meant a single file using control variables, so #if can be used to make decisions I was hoping to the user a single 'out of the box' setup which will look decent when using ether option. That way you could e.g. use radiosity for single frames and disable it for animation (that is if you're unwilling to let it render for hours when doing a animation of a couple of minutes :) ) I didn't like the hard separation between floor and the horizon you see when the camera angle is low. Thanks again for the feed back papacharly.
  16. roland
    Just got the blended background again, same settings just a bigger model (with radiosity same settings as the above zip file):
  17. roland
    Thanks to both for your thoughts. I was thinking about allowing include files to override stuff but have a contained single .pov by default. The main thing I'm 'fighting' currently is to have a single default setup which looks good/roughly the same color wise when used with or without radiosity enabled. Currently this gives me (without radiosity): and (with radiosity) Which seems over exposed (I think I'm using emission wrong, but I read somewhere to use that instead of ambient). I also don't really understand the sky sphere, as yesterday it blended the whole scene and now it suddenly only changes the background color and seem to influence the global lighting while I'm pretty sure nothing has changed This is generated from my current test export: http://www.melkert.net/test/povTest.zip The zip includes the original ldraw file and the LDCad animation script, but will only work with my last dev build, but might give some insight in how animations are generated (feedback on that is also welcome).
  18. roland
    Hi all, I was wondering if anyone here has experience animating LDraw models using POV-Ray. I'm working on a POV-Ray animation feature for my LDCad program. The export it self is going well but I have too little experience using POV-Ray to fine tune all those quality settings. So I'm looking for some help in that department. I'm mainly thinking about the global settings, this is what I'm using now: #declare doRadiosity=true; #declare useHQRadiosity=(frameCnt>1); global_settings { ambient_light rgb <1,1,1> assumed_gamma 2.2000 max_trace_level 20 #if (doRadiosity) radiosity { brightness 1.0000 media on always_sample on recursion_limit 6 #if (useHQRadiosity) //this should reduce noise, but will be much slower pretrace_end 0.01 //count 1000 low_error_factor 0.1 nearest_count 20 #end } #end } But I feel it might be less then optimal. Any advice is welcome.
  19. roland
    Thanks. I just realized LPub(3D) doesn't have an option to specify the unofficial library location, but I pretty sure it can be done somehow though.
  20. roland
    Did you configure both LPub and its renderer (usually LDView) to use the unofficial library. Also to prevent unofficial part problems you could also consider embediing them into the model file it self. The tool MPDCenter can be used for that.
  21. roland
    Yes It might be that the touch pad is too sensitive, I'll add a sensitivity option to 1.6 to 'slow down sampling' that might make things better for you. I'm always fighting LDView's camera as I'm hard wired to use trackball mode (and not just in LDCad).
  22. roland
    I made a short clip which might make things a bit more clear
  23. roland
    With the spin control I tried to mimic the LDD rotational behavior. X and Y angles are based on the x/y mouse cursor differences, then used as degrees to do: (rotate x degrees around y axis) * (rotate y degrees around the x axis) The trackball one uses incremental rotations by projecting the mouse current and previous location on a virtual sphere resulting in a quaternion which is then added to the current global quaternion which is converted to a normal rotation matrix whenever needed.
  24. roland
    Sping control uses x/y angles to setup the rotation matrix while trackball mode uses a quaternion vector. Sorry but I'm not sure what you are trying to show there. Because that's a professional engineering program which is a bit of an overkill for modelling LEGO models, Its also way more complex. it's more suited for modelling the pieces them selves something for which LDCad was never designed.
  25. roland
    Maybe for 2.0, I really don't understand the big issue though given MLCad and LDD both basically use the same layout (bins left, buttons top, editing leftover). Is it the menus?
×
×
  • Create New...