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Subject: 
Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Sun, 3 Dec 2006 16:26:50 GMT
Viewed: 
1702 times
  
I had in the past tried my hand (somewhat unsuccessfully) at creating some new LDraw parts. I found the tutorials on ldraw.org to be helpful, but I was surprised at how “manual” the process seems to be. (Edit the file in Notepad? Seriously??) Being a software geek, I found it easier to write a C program to transform coordinates and use printf() statements to write the .DAT file. This made it a lot easier to define cylinders and arcs, and to create pieces with a lot of symmetry. (Yes, I know I should be using sub-parts, but I’m still getting the hang of it.)

I recently took a fresh look at this code and tried to at least finish coding up a part. Growing tired of the process of switching back-and-forth between my program and (the very awesome) LDView, I added rudimentary graphics to show the general shape of the part on screen as it was being generated. Then it struck me that the program could evolve into an interactive part editor without a whole lot of effort.

So I am wondering if there would be any interest in a program like this, or would I be re-inventing functionality that is already provided somewhere else? For example, I see that one of the tutorials mentions using MLcad to rotate primitives and do some of the other heavy lifting required for authoring parts. I don’t want to spend a lot of time polishing this program for public release unless there is an actual need.

Any thoughts?



Message has 2 Replies:
  RE: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
If the program isn't capable of using primitives, any generated parts are bound to get "Hold - use more primitives" votes/comments when/if they are submitted to the Parts Tracker. So, without support for primitives, which MLCad and other editing (...) (18 years ago, 3-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad)
  Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
I have a plugin for SketchUp that can create LDraw parts. It can use LDraw primitives and sub-parts, scale, move, and rotate them, and export a .dat file. Here's a page with some models I have imported: (URL) the page for the plugin, with some (...) (18 years ago, 4-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

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