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Michael Horvath edited this page Dec 26, 2020 · 1 revision

MLCad

  1. Is still the fastest and easiest-to-use model editor for very large models, IMO.
  2. Doesn't like nested MPD files. Will throw tons of errors, and render the results improperly to the screen.
  3. Has weird drag-and-duplicate mouse behaviors that I dislike and don't know how to turn off.
  4. Parts lose focus when pressing the toolbar buttons. (E.g. the rotate button.)
  5. After changing camera views, the model you're looking at may no longer be visible, requiring you to locate it again by zooming and/or panning the camera.
  6. The camera controls for the 3D isometric view are very bad. This is one of the program's worst features, IMO.

LDView

  1. Can't specify camera location/look at explicitely. Have to use the mouse to drag the model around.
  2. Some camera movement controls are way too fast and/or jerky when viewing large models. Others are too slow. LeoCAD is a bit smoother and easier to control.
  3. No orthographic camera mode.
  4. Development version on GitHub now has a walk camera mode.

LDCad

  1. Very non-standard GUI.
  2. Has maybe too many confusing features.
  3. Graphical artifacts when displaying very large and/or distant models such as Datsville.
  4. POV-Ray output uses considerably fewer resources during renders. LDBoxer is no longer needed if you use this exporter.

LeoCAD

  1. Doesn't display the contents of LDraw files in the form of a multi-column list box like MLCad.
  2. Does not feature latitude/longitude camera rotations.
  3. Parses and renders models much faster than LDView. I.e. much higher framerate and lower loading times.
  4. Has an orthographic camera mode, unlike LDView.
  5. You can't add sub-models from your hard drive, though it has no problems displaying sub-models that have already been added.
  6. Almost achieves an FPS-style "walk mode". Has the required lateral and vertical camera movements using WASD, but camera rotation is still focused around an external point.
  7. POV-Ray output only supports textures, not materials. Thus transparent parts do not have custom IORs.
  8. In the POV-Ray output, the part "light.dat" will cause LeoCAD to create an empty mesh, which will crash the render.
  9. The POV-Ray output files are huge! Datsville is about 220MB when exported from LeoCad versus about 65MB when exported from LDView and about 50MB when exported from L3P.

L3P.exe

  1. May possibly be obsolete in some ways. Not 100% sure.
  2. The latest version AFAIK is the beta version dated 2013/12/02.
  3. It is the only tool AFAIK that can also make use of Anton Raves' POV-Ray parts.

LDBoxer

  1. Discussion
  2. Tore Eriksson's original Windows GUI version does not show buttons/controls when your display is set to use high DPI scaling, so sometimes you can't actually use it.
  3. The command-line version is a Python adaptation sritten by Jeremy Czajkowski and myself, and is available from the above discussion thread.
  4. The command-line version is very slow (2.5 hours to process 1000 lines of Datsville) unless you use PyPy (8 minutes to process 1000 lines of Datsville) instead of CPython. So make sure you install and use PyPy!
  5. MyBoxer is a JavaScript program written by myself that simply boxes every part it can find a replacement for, regardless of whether or not a part is visible from the top or bottom or not. Processing takes just a few minutes typically.
  6. Ideally a boxing tool would first process each submodel individually, then "inline" the model and process it a second time. I don't think the tools are smart enough to do this, however.
  7. There's no real need to use any of these programs if you create the POV-Ray files using LDCad instead of LDView or L3P. (Ed. Why? I forgot.)
  8. Boxing the parts also has little effect on framerates in LDView. Not sure about other programs.

MPDCenter

  1. I use this tool to "inline" the MPD files so that they can later be "boxed" using LDBoxer. I don't recall the exact steps I followed to accomplish this. The tool can be a little confusing.
  2. The newer versions of MPDCenter can inline models fairly quickly, including Datsville.
  3. Some dialog windows are messed up due to desktop DPI issues in Windows.
  4. Either MPDCenter or the inliner tool from the same author keeps changing the colors of some parts to color 382 for whatever reason. This will cause some POV-Ray renders to quit.

SunFlow

  1. Discussion
  2. Is supposedly much faster than POV-Ray.
  3. I have seen some very good quality renders made by other people, but my own attempts have not had pleasant results.
  4. You can edit some scene files in Notepad, but there are fewer things you can change about a scene than in POV-Ray.
  5. I was able in past to use this program, but am currenly not able to for unknown reasons. I can get the program's GUI to load once, but afterward it will cease to work.

Blender

  1. There are a couple of ways to get LDraw models into Blender:
    • Export a Collada DAE file from LeoCAD and then import this new file into Blender.
    • Use the LDR Importer to import the LDraw model directly into Blender.
  2. I have tried using the LDR Importer to get LDraw models into Blender, but it is very, very slow. After two days, it was not finished processing an older version of Datsville I inputted, so I quit. Exporting and importing a DAE model is much faster.
  3. In either case, the transparent colors are not properly handled. Not sure how to fix this or any other problems with materials.
  4. Blender uses a lot of memory. It was barely able to load a very old version of Datsville with 8GiB of RAM. The newest Datsville revisions are certainly out of the question!

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