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Subject: 
Re: New parts and color definition
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:10:01 GMT
Viewed: 
12146 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Willy Tschager wrote:
   In lugnet.cad, Tore Eriksson wrote:
   In lugnet.cad, Travis Cobbs wrote:
   In lugnet.cad, Michael Heidemann wrote:
   Please see also the comments about this issue on http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cgi?f=parts/73435.dat

The key thing I think should be brought away from those comments is the original LDraw handling of transparent colors. Colors 32-47 are simply transparent versions of colors 0-15. So, color 39 is a transparent version of color 7 (light gray), and color 40 is a transparent version of color 8 (dark gray). This seems to have caused the following two problems:
  • Real parts don’t come in those two colors, so one of the two needed to be picked for smoke. Prior to the creation of ldconfig.ldr, color 39 (trans light gray) was picked. (I think this is what happened; someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this.)
  • When ldconfig.ldr was introduced (apparently in 2003) it included color 40, but not color 39, even though the official parts library at that time included parts using color 39, but no parts using color 40.

Sorry if maybe I repeat something already said about color 39, but this is how I recall it:

In Original LDraw, clear looked better with dithered lightgrey than white, so James and I decided to use color 39 for window “glass”, instead of 47, which would have been the more natural choise. We would rather look for the best output than follow a strict protocol.

Now that noone I know of uses Original LDraw anymore, and I believe most renderers would make better result using 47 for plastic “glass”, there is no reason to stick to that old standard anymore.

This explains a lot of things - thx Tore for sharing. I’m going to discuss this in the LDConfig workgroup and see if we find a solution for the problem.

Something to consider for the discussion; ldglite still uses dithering to render the part images for the tracker. If for some reason you decide to move the clear glass color from 39 to color 47, you may want to also move the clear light grey RGB values with it. Otherwise the clear glass could appear foggy white in the part tracker pics.

Or maybe it’s time to switch to ldview for the part tracker pictures. I suspect the ldglite excutable used by the part tracker scripts predates the ldglite support for LDConfig.ldr. So you probably need to do a recompile with the current sources to see the expected results in the tracker pictures after moving all the colors around. Since a recompile may be needed, why not build an ldview executable instead?

Have fun,

Don



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: New parts and color definition
 
(...) Travis has worked on a switch after this post: (URL) I do not remember why there was no happy ending. w. (15 years ago, 10-Nov-09, to lugnet.cad)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: New parts and color definition
 
(...) This explains a lot of things - thx Tore for sharing. I'm going to discuss this in the LDConfig workgroup and see if we find a solution for the problem. w. (15 years ago, 10-Nov-09, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

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