Subject:
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Re: Exporting Minifig to Maya - edgy model
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.mlcad
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Date:
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Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:58:34 GMT
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Viewed:
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15589 times
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In lugnet.cad.mlcad, Björn Syse <bjorne@syse.se> wrote:
>
>
> Hey,
>
> I've been stuck with this problem for a while, so now I've come here for
> a discussion. It's quite simple actually, but I must say that I'm fairly
> new in the 3d world so I might have missed something crucial here.
>
> 1. I've made a simple minifig with the minifig generator i mlcad. Now I
> want to export this model and use it for rendering in Maya. In the
> export dialog I select to export LDraw primitives to cut of all the
> references to the part library.
>
> 2. Then I convert the .ldr to .obj using the LdrDat2Obj utility found at
> the the Ldraw.org plugins/downloads whatever page.
>
> 3. When I then open the model in maya, I see that the polygon count is
> really small - that is, the cap/head is all edgy and tesselated. So is
> the entire figure. A polygon smooth wont work to round of the head either.
>
> My question; Is there a way to control the "resolution" of the model at
> export, like a way to say how fine the mesh of polygons/how many
> polygons there should be? As I said, I'm new at the polygon stuff, used
> to NURBS.
It's certainly theoretically possible to convert much of the geometry with high
polygon counts. LDraw primitives are such that a smart converter can use
aribtrary complexity for cylinders, spheres, tori, etc. Having said that, it
doesn't sound like MLCad's existing converter does this, and unless there's a
setting to do so in LdrDat2Obj, then it can't be done with your existing tools.
Another thing to be aware of is that only the primitives can be converted with
higher accuracy. Any area of the model built with geometry instead of
primitives has a fixed level of detail. This will invariably lead to holes in
the model at the dividing line between the high-res smooth primitives and the
low-res non-primitive model geometry. On a minifig face, the whole front
section will be low-res, while the back of the head will be high-res.
LDView (the LDraw viewer that I am the author of) allows you to use varying
degrees of complexity for primitives. At its highest setting, circular smooth
curves are subdivided such that a full circle would consist of 96 segments.
(For comparison, the actual geometry in the parts library uses 16-segment
circles.) With certain parts, this looks great. With others, there are
noticeable holes. You're welcome to play around with that setting in LDView to
see how useful this kind of smoothing is, but it doesn't probably help you if
nobody creates a converter that supports this kind of functionality. (You'll
want to turn of the "Smooth curves" setting in LDView, as that generates smooth
surface normals for surfaces it considers to be curved. Those will tend to hide
the difference between primitives and geometry.)
Having said all that, it would PROBABLY be fairly straightforward to add a
feature to LDView to spit out all of the triangles in the model into a single
file in LDraw format. Is this something that people in general would find
useful?
--Travis Cobbs
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Exporting Minifig to Maya - edgy model
|
| Hey, I've been stuck with this problem for a while, so now I've come here for a discussion. It's quite simple actually, but I must say that I'm fairly new in the 3d world so I might have missed something crucial here. 1. I've made a simple minifig (...) (19 years ago, 29-Nov-05, to lugnet.cad.mlcad)
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