Subject:
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Re: Announcing Bricksmith for Macintosh
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.mac
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Date:
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Sun, 28 Aug 2005 03:19:20 GMT
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Viewed:
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3678 times
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Incidentally, though, I don’t find POV-Ray renderings to be the best for
instructions, as they’re too realistic. For instructions, I want something
more diagrammatic, with clear lines delineating the blocks. Does anyone have
any recommendations for such a renderer? (And Allen, would you consider
building it right into BrickSmith?)
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Oh Joe, what a can of worms that is. You’re absolutely right that POV-Ray is
useless for instructions. It’s very nice for the picture on the front of the
box, but it doesn’t outline edges. The good news is that there is a solution.
The following method was explained to me by Steve Barile, and produces lovely
output:
First, you need MacMegaPOV 0.7. It’s a variant of POV-Ray with an
easy-to-understand GUI. But when I did instructions last, Mac MegaPOV was up to
version 1.0, but which did not include the edge-tracing feature. There is a
newer version now; I don’t know if edge-tracing has been restored. If not, I
have a copy of 0.7 I can e-mail. I do not think the old version is otherwise
available on the internet.
Once you have MacMegaPOV 0.7, things are real
easy. Just add the following line to the top of you your POV-Ray file from L3P:
#version unofficial MegaPov 0.7;
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Then paste in this block at the bottom:
global_settings {
post_process {
find_edges {
2, //depth difference required for line
0.35, //angle difference required for line
0.2, //color difference required for line
1.1, // 2.0 default line width
20, // 1.4 default line sharpness
rgb 0 //color of line
}
}
}
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Tweak the values as needed.
For high-quality instructions, render the scene at some absurdly large
resolution. I used 2048 x 1536 or so for a 16x16 baseplate. The more RAM, the
merrier. I think I needed about 512 MB (physical + virtual) when I did it. The
good news is that you can decrease the rendering quality to Level 1 or so,
because all you really need is plain color. MegaPOV’s post-processor will then
find the edges, and you’ll have instructions to die for. They look nearly as
good as Lego’s.
Once you have the software (e-mail me!), this is a very easy
process, and the results are extremely rewarding.
Sincerely,
Allen Smith
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Announcing Bricksmith for Macintosh
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| (...) Thanks, Anton. I tried your converter the other day, and it gave me blank files, so I gave up on it and just downloaded L3D (which worked fine). But now I'll give your converter another try too. Incidentally, though, I don't find POV-Ray (...) (19 years ago, 26-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac, FTX)
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