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LDraw
LDraw is a system of freeware tools for modeling Lego creations in 3D on a computer. The LDraw file format and original program were written by James Jessiman, although the file format has since evolved and extended. He also modeled many of the original parts in the parts library, which is under continuous maintenance and extension by the LDraw community. Following Jessiman's death in 1997, a variety of programs have been written that use the LDraw parts library, and file format. LDraw models are frequently rendered in POV-Ray or Blender, free 3D ray tracers. File format The LDraw format can divide a model into steps so that the building instructions can be incorporated into the design, and also allows for steps that rotate the camera and even move parts around in an elementary fashion. It also allows for models to be incorporated in the construction of larger models to make design easier. This also makes the file format space efficient: instead of specifying the polygons of eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lego
Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things. The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. , 600 billion Lego parts had been produced. History The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LeoCAD
LeoCAD is a free and open-source 3D CAD program for creating virtual Lego models by using parts from LDraw library. It was developed by Leonardo Zide in 1997. See also * Lego Digital Designer References Bibliography * T. Santos, A. Ferreira, F. Dias & M. J. FonsecaUsing Sketches and Retrieval to Create LEGO Models Eurographics Eurographics is a Europe-wide professional computer graphics association. The association supports its members in advancing the state of the art in computer graphics and related fields such as multimedia, scientific visualization and human–compu ... Workshop on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling, 2008. * Daniel Mendes, Alfredo FerreiraVirtual LEGO Modelling on Multi-Touch Surfaces 2011. ISBN 978-80-86943-83-1 * Van Thanh Tran, Dongho Kim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freeware
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the freeware it offers. For instance, modification, redistribution by third parties, and reverse engineering are permitted by some publishers but prohibited by others. Unlike with free and open-source software, which are also often distributed free of charge, the source code for freeware is typically not made available. Freeware may be intended to benefit its producer by, for example, encouraging sales of a more capable version, as in the freemium and shareware business models. History The term ''freeware'' was coined in 1982 by Andrew Fluegelman, who wanted to sell PC-Talk, the communications application he had created, outside of commercial distribution channels. Fluegelman distributed the program via a process now termed '' shareware''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POV-Ray
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license. History Sometime in the 1980s, David Kirk Buck downloaded the source code for a Unix ray tracer to his Amiga. He experimented with it for a while and eventually decided to write his own ray tracer named DKBTrace after his initials. He posted it to the "You Can Call Me Ray" bulletin board system (BBS) in Chicago, thinking others might be interested in it. In 1987, Aaron A. Collins downloaded DKBTrace and began working on an x86 port of it. He and David Buck collaborated to add ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blender (software)
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games. Blender's features include 3D modelling, UV mapping, texturing, digital drawing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animation, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing. History The Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not related to Neo Geo video game hardware) started to develop Blender as an in-house application, and based on the timestamps for the first source files, January 2, 1994 is considered to be Blender's birthday. Version 1.00 was released in January 1995, with the primary author being company co-owner and software developer Ton Roosendaal. The name ''Blender'' was inspired by a song by the Swiss electroni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ray Tracing (graphics)
In 3D computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for modeling light transport for use in a wide variety of rendering algorithms for generating digital images. On a spectrum of computational cost and visual fidelity, ray tracing-based rendering techniques, such as ray casting, recursive ray tracing, distribution ray tracing, photon mapping and path tracing, are generally slower and higher fidelity than scanline rendering methods. Thus, ray tracing was first deployed in applications where taking a relatively long time to render could be tolerated, such as in still computer-generated images, and film and television visual effects (VFX), but was less suited to real-time applications such as video games, where speed is critical in rendering each frame. Since 2018, however, hardware acceleration for real-time ray tracing has become standard on new commercial graphics cards, and graphics APIs have followed suit, allowing developers to use hybrid ray tracing and rasterization- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units. Code points with lower numerical values, which tend to occur more frequently, are encoded using fewer bytes. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that valid ASCII text is valid UTF-8-encoded Unicode as well. UTF-8 was designed as a superior alternative to UTF-1, a proposed variable-length encoding with partial ASCII compatibility which lacked some features including self-synchronizing code, self-synchronization and fully ASCII-compatible handling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Byte Order Mark
The byte order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: * The byte order, or endianness, of the text stream in the cases of 16-bit and 32-bit encodings; * The fact that the text stream's encoding is Unicode, to a high level of confidence; * Which Unicode character encoding is used. BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise handle the text stream. Unicode can be encoded in units of 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit integers. For the 16- and 32-bit representations, a computer receiving text from arbitrary sources needs to know which byte order the integers are encoded in. The BOM is encoded in the same scheme as the rest of the document and becomes a Unicode code point if its bytes are swapped. Hence, the process access ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lego Digital Designer
Lego Digital Designer is a CAD software made by Lego which allowed people to design a virtual model using a selection of virtual Lego bricks. These models could be saved locally, as well as uploaded to the Lego website for sharing and ordering as a physical product. It is available for macOS and Windows, but only as a 32-bit application, which means that it no longer runs on current versions of macOS. The program allows users to build models using virtual Lego bricks, in a computer-aided design like manner. Until January 16, 2012, these could be uploaded, along with instructions and a box design, to the Lego Design byME website, from where the models could be ordered for delivery as a real, packaged set. Users can also take screenshots of their models and store the models on their computer in an .LXF file. On November 9, 2011, Lego declared that the Design byME service was going to end on January 16, 2012 due to its failure to meet quality expectations and for being too complex. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
