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LDRAW and LDD to DXF, SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor


Tielc
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Hello,

 

I wanted to share with this group a couple of small translators I've written.  They can read LDRAW (.dat) and LDD (.g) files and translate them to DXF, SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor.  Each is final application is a separate app.

 

With the help of bartvbl I've been able to include the ability to now read .g files from LDD where before I couldn't and it's important to credit him with all the work on reading the binary file format.

 

There are a few current limitations.  First is .g files where a brick would have any variants with decorations.  Like bartvbl's viewer, there will be faces missing in these cases.  Still working on figuring out some stuff from the children files associated with them (.g1, .g2, etc.)

 

Second, the Autodesk Inventor translator is quite slow with larger brick files.  Unfortunately the Inventor API requires a lot of object references to just create a face in 3D.  Granted I'm comparing this to the SolidWorks API that requires a single API call for each face.  Also, Inventor's merge surface option currently doesn't produce any different results when checked or unchecked.  I've submitted this to their API Development group and they've opened a support request as they're seeing the same issue.  In both cases (SolidWorks and Inventor) the documentation for creating BREP geometry directly is not documented very well, as I don't think it's common in a parametric design tool (where features, not faces are build one at a time).

 

I also wanted to share this on the LDRAW forums, as this is where the original request for SolidWorks and Inventor translators came from.  However, I have tried repeatedly to log in and request password changes, etc. with little luck.

 

Anyway, here is a video showing how the different translators work.

 

http://youtu.be/PIb53rd_DGk

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is really neat. There's something I find meditative about making my own bricks from scratch in SolidWorks (plus they are then SolidWorks native features) but it's a cool tool.

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  • 2 years later...
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