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Subject: 
Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Mon, 4 Dec 2006 16:52:02 GMT
Viewed: 
1807 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Chris Phillips wrote: Some features that I could see being useful are:

Google is your friend. Some of these ideas have already been worked on. Make sure to run some searches before re-inventing.

  
  • Ability to easily overlay a scaled/rotated wire-frame of the part over a scan of the actual part, to verify the proportions and provide “digital caliper” functionality.

  • Ability to define one section of a symmetrical part, and have the program automatically generate the redundant portions at various angles. (I know you can manually do this in MLcad, and that you can mirror a design around the axes, but not so easy for designing a 3-blade propellor, for example.)

Make sure you check out the discussion about mirroring bits without using negative matrices. There were some tools developed and a mirror.ini file but I’m not sure it’s exactly what you’re looking for. At the very least, any mirroring tool should be able to add an entry to the mirror.ini file.

  
  • Automated “snap to object” CAD features to avoid gaps.

  • Scripted generation of part definitions to simplify iterative design methods.

Make sure to check out the Ldraw Script Compiler and LDS shell first.

  
  • Never having to say “you really should learn matrix manipulation” to a potential parts author. I mean, I think I have a pretty good grasp of that, having worked on a ray-tracing engine in the past, but I still need to look stuff up whenever I use it. Filling the brain with such details really intereferes with the overall process and adds unnecessary hurdles for the casual designer. Really, what are computers for if not doing matrix operations for us?
It looks like my project might make a good LDDP plug-in. I’ll consider that as my best option moving forward.

If you make an interactive part editor as an LDDP plug-in, consider also making a simple wrapper program for it so you can run it in stand-alone mode as well.



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
(...) Ah, yes. The answer to every question is "google." :) (...) Thanks again! Lots of great info here. (...) Unfortunately, (URL) LDS Shell> is another one of those broken links. The script compiler looks almost exactly like what I had in mind, (...) (18 years ago, 4-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Any Interest in a Program for Creating/Editing Parts?
 
(...) Thanks for that link! Very helpful for me, especially since many of the links to tools (both here in .cad and on ldraw.org) appear to be broken. (...) I am all for saving myself a lot of unneccesary effort, and I think that the existing tools (...) (18 years ago, 4-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

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