PDO tools and format discussion

[imcold]

Lazarus + Freepascal.

[codex34]

The mountain/valley folds require quite complicated maths.

Tabs are easy to work out, it's basic trig.
If you take a look at the drawing used to work them out, the maths should be quite obvious.
The only problem was the floating point errors, computational mathematics and all that stuff.

[imcold]

New version is out: PDO tools
Changes:

• better material color support
• tabs, thanks to codex34

The tab support is not quite perfect, but works good enough.

[imcold]

New version's out: PDO tools
The precision of the bitmaps in exported SVG file is improved. Also, the default export DPI is lowered to 125; most of the PDOs don't have enough texture resolution to make anything higher justifiable.
Second, the SVG export speed is vastly improved; expect more than double speedup for dual-core machines, somewhat less on old ones.

[Revell-Fan]

The new version is great! I'm using it on my new Chopper droid (modeling in SketchUp > unfolding in Pepakura > exporting with PDOTools > editing and fine tuning in CorelDRAW). The tabs export works for me and is an excellent addition. Thank you very much, imcold & codex34!

[imcold]

Thanks for the feedback The next version will export fold lines as well, thanks to codex34 again. I'll release it right after pdf export gets reasonably usable (it's missing text export atm.), probably next week.

[Revell-Fan]

WOW! That's great news! I'm looking forward to this. Regarding the folding lines, I usually need a mix of unlined and lined version. E.g., when I unfold a cylinder or a curved object I would need the folding lines at the glue tabs but no lines across the textured area, so some sort of "intelligent" lines. I guess this won't be possible to achieve automatically?

[imcold]

Having fold lines only on tabs is doable. Pepakura already has an option to hide fold lines if the angle between surfaces is below a certain treshold, that could work for certain curved objects I guess. But I'd have to add it to the exporters too.

[paperPino]

Originally Posted by imcold

New version's out: PDO tools
The precision of the bitmaps in exported SVG file is improved. Also, the default export DPI is lowered to 125; most of the PDOs don't have enough texture resolution to make anything higher justifiable.

Thank you very much for your precious software. I am one of the few people that would appreciate a significant increase of the max DPI export, I mean up to 300-400 DPI. Is this target too difficult to accomplish? If I remember well, previous version (that I have unfortunately deleted) reached 300 DPI...

Thanks again!

[Revell-Fan]

That would be really awesome, especially for designers and kits which are made using hi-res textures.

( @paperPino : I still have the previous version which exports to 300 dpi..! )