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Subject: 
Re: Converting AutoCAD/3D Studio/etc. to .dat with 3DWin
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Tue, 25 Feb 2003 22:59:47 GMT
Viewed: 
731 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Miguel Agullo writes:
Hi Darrell,

My point was that asking people to help someone develop their commercial
software is somewhat of a bold proposition.

Excellent point, and one I hadn't considered. I suppose I can just out and out
ask him if he minds AFOL using the demo version only, especially since they
would be helping him debug the product. He's aware that most LDraw related
software is free. I don't think 3DWin's target audience is AFOL.

In any event, if and when a translator between .DAT and some standard 3D
format comes through, it will cause for celebration. It is not only the
people with the big toys that get to play, but AFOLs will no longer be
forced to render through POV. POV delivers, specially with apps like L3P and
Lpub - but it is also a great example of non-intuitive software. For a
casual user, it is much more interesting o learn the basic of anim8or,
blender, milkshake, etc than to dig into the POV help file. This is
specially true if the user lacks previous rendering experience.

Totally agree. Going the other way (DAT-CAD) would be a great side benefit to
getting any of these translators to work.. Although most AFOL would say what I
want (CAD-DAT) is the real side benefit! LOL

Here's my take: on one side you have AFOL who cling to two major tenets: LDraw
parts and FREE. On the other side, you have people who have commercial CAD
software (and I differentiate here between the CG community and the CAD/CAM
community). These people have access to powerful modeling and rendering tools,
but they're usually NOT FREE.

Right now the AFOL side is working hard on making the FREE stuff work like
the NOT FREE stuff. That's a perfectly reasonable and admirable task, and
something that will benefit more general AFOL in the end. They'll probably
succeed simply because of the amount and quality of work being done as well as
the talents of all the people involved.

Personally, I'd rather work on getting the NOT FREE stuff talk to LDraw stuff
for two major reasons: 1) the people who know the NOT FREE stuff don't
want to relearn modeling just to play with LEGO and 2) NOT FREE stuff is
of use to Industry - i.e. knowing how to use it is a marketable skill. But I
understand as a Designer and Educator I have different motives for the work
than the typical AFOL.

But philosophies aside, we are SO CLOSE to having this bridge between the CAD
and AFOL communities completed. At last count there are 2-3 programs that are
about 80% there. It would be a shame to abandon this work (or leave it to rot
unfinished) at this point. My problem is I'm not a programmer and I
don't know enough about LDraw to debug the converted parts - but I'm working on
it! I'm hoping this thread can scare up some ideas so we can get past that 20%
hurdle. Hopefully they won't dead end at 98%!

Darrell



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Converting AutoCAD/3D Studio/etc. to .dat with 3DWin
 
Hi Darrell, My point was that asking people to help someone develop their commercial software is somewhat of a bold proposition. However, I did not know that 3Dwin had a free version with batch-convert de-activated and that is something worth (...) (22 years ago, 25-Feb-03, to lugnet.cad)

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