| Jacob's LEGO: Toolbox | [ Contents | News ] |
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| LEGO CAD on Linux |
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| I have written a guide to installing and using LDGLite for viewing building instructions on Linux. |
My digital LEGO toolbox currently contains the following tools:
LDraw is a LEGO-style Computer Aided Design system. It produces instruction-style images of LEGO-style models. It can display on the screen, or create graphic file output, in Windows BMP format. It can produce step-by-step images (which you are then responsible for organizing into a step-by-step presentation).
This is a two-step fractal landscape generator for LDraw. The first step
is the program Fractal_Landscape, which makes a fractal landscape
as a grey-scale bitmap (PGM). The second step is the program
PGM_To_LDraw, which converts a grey-scale bitmap (in the PGM
format) to a LDraw source file (.DAT).
The idea behind this two-step process is that you can go inbetween the two programs and edit the landscape yourself. - Make a level road, smoothen the landscape a bit, etc.
Binary versions of the package are availiable for DOS, OS/2, and RS/6000. If you're using another operating system, you'll have to compile the programs yourself.
Older binary distributions:
You can get free Ada compilers for a lot of operating system/architectures at Ada Core Technologies.
The latest version of the fractal landscape generator was made availiable June 15th 1997.
The L-CAD group has defined a file format that allows multiple LDraw
files in a single file. This is very practical for transmitting complex
models composed for several LDraw files by e-mail (or newsgroups). The
official documentation of the MPD file format can be found at:
http://www.ldraw.org/Article47.html
I have created tools
for converting LDraw files (".ldr") to MPD files
(".mpd") and back to LDraw files.
Tom Pfeifer (pfeifer@fokus.gmd.de)
maintains the LEGO
frequently asked questions (FAQ).
<sparre@nbi.dk>