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Subject: 
RE: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Sun, 3 Dec 2006 17:50:25 GMT
Viewed: 
1706 times
  
primitives - boxes, cylinders, discs, negative discs etc

-----Original Message-----
From: news-gateway@lugnet.com [mailto:news-gateway@lugnet.com] On Behalf
Of Chris Phillips
Sent: 03 December 2006 17:10
To: lugnet.cad@lugnet.com
Subject: Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?


In lugnet.cad, William Howard wrote:
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 helper applications have, I
would have to question the overal usefulness of such a program

When you say "primitives", do you really mean "sub-parts?"  (Or do I
have it
backwards?)

To be clear, I would plan to fully support the use of sub-parts, as well
as the ability to copy/paste portions of pre-existing part definitions.
This feature would probably have to also bring along any "author"
meta-tags to properly attribute the source of any copied material.

But it sounds like what you are really saying is that MLcad already does
this reasonably well?  I have read that it is possible to directly use
primitives in MLcad, as you would use any "real" part, but I didn't see
any tutorials that talk about how to do this.  And it seems to me that
the UI of MLcad (which is my favorite LDraw modeling program) isn't
quite geared toward part creation.  I would love to be proven wrong...

When you say "other editing helper applications" are you implying that
programs like what I am proposing already exist?  That would certainly
save me a lot of redundant effort.  Can you name a few of these apps so
I know where to look?

-----Original Message-----
From: news-gateway@lugnet.com [mailto:news-gateway@lugnet.com] On
Behalf Of Chris Phillips
Sent: 03 December 2006 16:27
To: lugnet.cad@lugnet.com
Subject: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?


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 1 Reply:
  Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
(...) Ok, thanks. When I think of primitives, I usually think of the lowest-level elements of the underlying graphics package. In this case, Line, Triangle, Quadrilateral, and Conditional Line. I thought things like Cylinder, Box, etc., being built (...) (18 years ago, 3-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
(...) When you say "primitives", do you really mean "sub-parts?" (Or do I have it backwards?) To be clear, I would plan to fully support the use of sub-parts, as well as the ability to copy/paste portions of pre-existing part definitions. This (...) (18 years ago, 3-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad)

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