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I proxy this on behalf of Sergio Reano, who for some technical reasons is not
able to post to LUGNET. Please post here your comments but cc: also to Sergio
via mail.
Hi everybody,
my name is Sergio Reano and I'm a programmer and Lego fun from Italy.
In the last few years I have had little time to play with real bricks and
decided to mix passion and informatics to create a new Lego CAD software to
enjoy Lego at least while I was in front of the screen.
The program I came up with, called SR 3D Builder, is IMHO very innovative
compared to MLCad or Lego Digital Designer 'cos it is able to recognize
automatically connections between LDraw parts and, based on that, to manage
hinges, rotation axels, gears. Additional functionality is planed for the
future.
To allow connection detection, I have associated the most common connections
like studs, axles, pins with the subpart representing an existing connection. In
short: every time the program finds a STUD.dat subpart it adds a connection of
the STUD type with the same coordinates. The connections it manages are almost
the same you can find in http://www.ldraw.org/Article135.html, but minifigs and
most of the hinges are still not implemented.
Problem is; it's really hard to create a connection when there is no subpart I
can associate with. The only way I found was to patch every single .dat part by
hand, adding lines which describe this kind of connection (especially hinges).
The program plus the patched parts definitions can be freely downloaded from
http://staff.polito.it/sergio.reano (a link has also been added to the download
section at LDraw.org). Please have a look at it and let me know what you think
about.
As you might already guess there are a lot of parts to patch, and I'm feeling
kind of lost with the huge library out there. What I'm looking for are helping
hands to patch the parts (the software you'll need will be provided).
Furthermore, I would like to establish contact with someone of the LDraw
organization in order to work out a standard for the connections.
I have contacted Willy Tschager and he has proposed a standard based on meta
commands:
0 !NEW CONNECTION conn_type, xpos,ypos,zpos, xorient, yorient, zorient
where
- conn_type identify connection type (stud, hinge, ...)
- x,y,z pos identify connection position
- x,y,z orient identify connection orientation
which would be ok for me, even though I currently use a different code (you can
find the technical specification on my site).
I would be really happy hearing form you (especially form those willing to patch
;-) You can contact me at: Sergio[dot]reano(at)polito{dot}it
Thank you,
Sergio
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