LD Assistant Simple and So Easy to Remember! The screen shot below shows our NEW LD Assistant Task Manager, a revolutionary tool for advanced, intermediate and even novice LD Assistant users. The Task Manager allows the user to instantly perform any LD Assistant function without the need to memorize menus and commands. "Over the last few years the enhancement our customers most often requested was to make the program easer to remember how to use," says Rufus Warren of Design & Drafting. "Many users told us that they would forget the more complex commands after not working with LD Assistant for a while. We listened, and have added an intuitive step-by-step Wizard.   What The !@#$% (Five Million Polygons) by Kevin Denzel When drawing a realistic object in LD Assistant, CAD Artists want to be as accurate and 'real-life' as possible. However, there are occasions where you will need to cut corners because of time constraints or your computer's processing power, and this should influence how you approach a project.  For example, let's say you're placing a room-space into LD Assistant. You’re already dismantling elements like doorways, wall-trim, chandeliers and carpet, but for a complex element like a chandelier or sconce you may benefit from a different approach.---- For this Sconce we have two main textures. In fig 1 we have a white hazy frost for the light to glow through and a polished brass.  All of the metal is basically the same LD material, but its 3D design is different.  The Stars are consistent.  When drawing a single star it is made into a BLOCK and copy/pasted/rotated/mirrored into place. When using the BLOCK EDITOR each star would change its attributes across the entire .dwg file. Fig 2 shows my results with a reasonable amount of time drawing.       Next let's take a look at a real-life object that will have even more complex geometry drawn in the model space.           · 3d Stars on upper area · Top ring polished brass above stars – 8’ outer diameter · Identically sized ring below stars · Middle ring polished brass 4’ diameter · Bottom polished brass element creates a joining space · Polished brass spacers (like a analog clock) with 1-12 spacing · Crystal beads are larger at top of each strand and decrease in size towards joining point of middle ring and bottom piece · Approximately 10 strands per brass to brass band on lower section. The top section has twice as many strands. The crystal beads were created with a 6-sided polygon lofted-ruled.  In total, the entire chandelier came to about 500k polygons.  By the time I multiply the quantity of chandeliers in the real drawing I’m approaching 5,000,000 polygons, which any computer would have an issue with.  The beads were automatically rotated and aligned using the LDSEATING Tool …yes, LDSEATING is usable for any block and not just chairs. So the big problem is….how do you get the polygon count severed by a fraction? You could try a 3D Revolve with a spherical mapping of the texture, but the LDMATERIAL blends together and it takes away from the realism of the source item.  This makes something like a 3d fishbowl supported by metal bands, as shown below. A chandelier is usually a “peripheral vision object” so being exact isn’t life or death, but being more exact than a 3d fishbowl will certainly help though. In order to get away from three 6-sided polygons in a lofted-ruled block and multiply by almost 3,000 beads per object (which is about 100 polygons per bead) we need to cheat it for a computer to handle. Not being exact is making a sacrifice in perceived reality, but would you rather the computer not handle processing anything at all or cut this corner? A square turned into a region means only two polygons per “perceived crystal bead” instead of 100.   You can use the LDSEATING Tool in the same manner. The final outcome is something that most computers can handle and it maintains relative realism with the original.   Featured LD Assistant Rendering If a picture is worth a thousand words... then here's a few thousand! Special thanks to Kevin Denzel for allowing us to show some of his work. 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Design & Drafting appreciates your interest in our products. Please forward this newsletter to your friends and associates, however, NO part of this newsletter may be used without permission. © Copyright 2013 by Chicago Stage Equipment Company Inc. D.B.A. Design & Drafting. Autodesk, AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, DWF, DWG, DXF, ObjectARX are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.© 2012 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved. Rufus Warren Editor