Subject:
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Re: Bricksmith 1.3: Here's Looking at You, Kid
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.mac
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Date:
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Tue, 4 Apr 2006 05:18:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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8084 times
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In lugnet.cad.dev.mac, Allen Smith wrote:
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In lugnet.cad.dev.mac, Travis Cobbs wrote:
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In lugnet.cad.dev.mac, Allen Smith wrote:
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Of course, producing print-quality images using a real-time
onscreen design program like Bricksmith just wouldn’t work out well; the
images wouldn’t be a high-enough resolution.
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The resolution argument actually doesn’t hold up. When I added printing
support to LDView in Windows, I made it generate an image using tiling that
was at the printer’s resolution (or maybe I maxed out at 300DPI; that was
four years ago, so I don’t really remember).
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Okay, that puts me in my place. I hereby recant any prior suggestions about
crummy resolution! Now that we have established that OpenGL can produce
print-quality images, my question is: Can OpenGL produce instruction-quality
graphics? Even more germanely, can Bricksmith produce such graphics? I
seriously doubt it.
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For what it’s worth, I don’t think most people are aware that OpenGL can be used
to render images at arbitrary resolutions. Most video cards don’t support
rendering directly above 2048x2048. (Presumably the new cards that support
2560x1600 monitor resolution support higher.)
I’d say that OpenGL can be used to make fairly decent instructions. I won’t
claim that they can equal the quality of carefully created instructions
generated via MegaPOV, but I’d say that they can definitely be pretty good. I
uploaded a 5MB PNG file (designed for printing full-page at 600DPI) here:
http://www.halibut.com/~tcobbs/ldraw/private/10030ImperialStarDestroyer1.png
Note that it doesn’t look too great at 100% on your monitor, but it should look
pretty good printed. I also scaled the image down to screen resolution, and put
the (much smaller) file here:
http://www.halibut.com/~tcobbs/ldraw/private/10030ImperialStarDestroyer2.png
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Usable instructions demand boldly-outlined edges
around each part. Bricksmith doesn’t do that, even more so because it doesn’t
even draw conditional lines. But even if it did, I don’t think part-outlining
would begin to approach what MegaPOV can do, which is to say that it would be
well nigh useless.
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I’m not sure why. Actually, I think programs that are LDraw-aware can do a
better job at outlining, because they can outline exactly what the part authors
decided needs to be outlined when the parts were created. The samples above
have outlining turned on. By the way, how do you get MegaPOV to draw lines
between parts that make up a wall? I thought it’s auto-outlining required
changes in depth between adjacent pixels in order to work.
Having said that, conditional lines are going to be slow to draw in an
OpenGL-accelerated editor, unless somebody figures out a way to put them into a
Vertex program. The above Star Destroyer gets about 12FPS on my computer in
LDView with edge lines enabled, but conditional lines disabled. It gets just
under 3FPS with conditional lines enabled along with edge lines. It gets 20FPS
with no edge lines at all.
In an editor, I think having the edges visible is a huge help to editing, but
conditional lines add a relatively minor improvement. Of course, if you’re
editing a small file, you can have edge lines and conditional lines, and still
get good performance. The Star Destroyer does have over 3000 pieces, remember.
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LPub, meanwhile, is based on POV-Ray/MegaPOV, so it has
little bearing on whether OpenGL viewers should have built-in image-exporting
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I wasn’t trying to say that it does. I was responding to your point about it
not being feasible to automate your work-flow.
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abilities. LPub is essentially a way to automate the highly-labor-intensive
render-it-all-by-hand process I use for my own instructions, and can
therefore produce output I would deem acceptable. If you want easy and good
instructions on the Mac, recreate the LPub workflow! Unfortunately, I don’t
have the time to do that; my hands are full enough with an LDraw editor. But
it would be fantastic if someone could do it, because I’m the first to admit
that my way stinks.
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Well, the source is available, but I think it’s in C++ Builder. I don’t know
much about C++ Builder, but I’m guessing there’s no easy way to get it up and
running outside Windows.
I don’t want to come across the wrong way here. My original comments were made
just as a statement that it’s perfectly reasonable to have decent print quality
out of an OpenGL app for creation of instructions. I don’t have access to a
Mac, so I haven’t been able to look at Bricksmith, but based on the screenshots
and the comments here, I think you’ve got yourself a great app. And since your
primary goal is to make a good editor, support for these kind of
instructions-generation features would just take away from your primary work on
the editor. And, to be perfectly honest, producing decent instructions would
definitely take a lot of work. I think my comments may have come across as
condescending, or implying that you should be taking action based on them. I
just want to say here that that wasn’t my intention at all, but reading what I
wrote, I can definitely see how it could have been interpreted that way.
Having said all that, if anyone would be interested in STEP support in LDView on
the Mac, by all means let me know. I’ve had requests for it on the PC, and it’s
on my “to-do” list, but I’ll be honest and admit that LPub’s ability to use
LDView as a renderer in Windows really decreased the priority of that feature
for me. Not having access to a Mac, I haven’t been the one that has compiled it
there lately, but there is a Mac version of the QT LDView. It’s not native, but
it should at least work. If I had a Mac, I’d update the Cocoa port of LDView,
but I don’t, and it’s not all that likely that I will any time soon.
--Travis
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Bricksmith 1.3: Here's Looking at You, Kid
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| Travis, Those images are very impressive! The lines are big and bold, instead of disappearing into the surface they are supposed to be outlining. They are instruction-grade. I will say, however, that MegaPOV does a better job doing stud outlining on (...) (19 years ago, 7-Apr-06, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Bricksmith 1.3: Here's Looking at You, Kid
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| (...) Okay, that puts me in my place. I hereby recant any prior suggestions about crummy resolution! Now that we have established that OpenGL can produce print-quality images, my question is: Can OpenGL produce instruction-quality graphics? Even (...) (19 years ago, 4-Apr-06, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac, FTX)
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