| 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.
The fractal landscape generator is written in Ada. You can learn about Ada in the
Ada
Programming
wikibook, if you want to modify the program.
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).
<jacob@sparre-andersen.dk>