Subject:
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Re: Parts editing made easy (well, easier)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Mon, 21 Feb 2005 01:38:20 GMT
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Viewed:
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1745 times
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My converter has undergone a considerable update during the weekend.
It is now called "max2dat", because it now handles the 3DS file format
as well, and supports the two main export formats from 3dsmax.
(The previous "max2dat" utility written in Visual Basic a long time
ago is no longer maintained, by word from its author.)
The 3DS support is not fully tested, but it seems to work for the
models I tried it on. The file format is detected automatically,
just run the program on a 3DS file and it will (hopefully) do its job.
I was also a bit puzzled to see that LDView does not smooth the
surfaces. If anybody knows why, please tell me.
Regarding the comments on the teapot model as such: that is *not* intended
to be a proper LDraw part, it's just the very simple pre-fabricated teapot
primitive from 3dsmax, exported and converted. The ugly self-intersections
are there in the model. Such flaws can be removed with CSG operations in
most modelers, 3dsmax included, so I don't consider such operations to
be the task of my conversion program.
The stray lines were degenerate triangles, again a flaw in the teapot
mesh as such, but I added a degenerate face removal to the conversion,
because it's hard to detect such errors graphically while modeling.
I also added a removal of redundant vertices while I was at it.
The 3DS format duplicates vertices like crazy, so I really had to
do that for the 3DS conversion to work as intended.
Please note that for proper quad detection, it is required that
the input file is generated from a model containing quads, and
that the export preserves that information. Converting a DXF file
or some similar format to 3DS and then running my converter will
generate only triangles. I will look into this, but I designed
the program to use quad connectivity information when available,
and all 3DS and ASE files exported directly from 3dsmax contain
very useful and correct information on that.
Export formats from other 3D design software, like OBJ and LWO
files, should contain similar information. DXF files and most
other CAD export formats do not.
Regarding sorting and structuring of the output file:
the source for this teapot demo is one single mesh.
It is very hard to do anything intelligent like proper
grouping of primitives with a totally unstructured input.
I will add support for multiple named objects later, and
that will provide better means for structuring the output.
I'm still taking requests for features. Please feel free to
comment further!
Stefan G
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Parts editing made easy (well, easier)
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| (I posted this to lugnet.cad toplevel, but considering the total lack of response, I decided to try it down here in .dev instead, where I got all that nice feedback for my last post.) After a couple of days of coding fun, I finally have the ASE to (...) (20 years ago, 18-Feb-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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