[Software] LDD2PovRay

[WetWired]

Yes, those are the flex parts. LDD2POVRay does not convert their flex data during conversion so they behave as standard parts. It is better to have them removed in LDD before conversion.

Otherwise a nice render - I would say that this kind of view would deserve activated focal blur to make it look more realistic - focal point is on the brick that is selected in LDD as a center of camera rotation (the brick camera is looking at).

The LDD2POVRay Converter must be running, because the virtual path \\.\LDDIncludes exists only while it is running.

I think, in your case the problem is, that you stored you POV file in the same directory as you have specified as target directory for the POV-Ray includes (both are C:\Documents and Settings\SF\Skrivebord\LEGO\LDD Tools). This does not work, because when POV-Ray looks for the include files, it by default searches the directory where the POV scene file is stored. After that it searched Library Path. This means, that regardless of you Library Path it finds directly the binary includes.

Please, store your POV files in different directory than the include files generated by LDD2POVRay.

And please, remove the C:\Documents and Settings\SF\Skrivebord\LEGO\LDD Tools from Library Path it is not necessary there.

Thank you.

While you weren't answering my question this reply helped my render to finally start, Thanks, will post results when it's done.

[Classicsmiley]

Another bug -

I just tried using the IndoorHQ radiosity setting, and I got the following message:

Parse Error: No Matching } in 'radiosity', undeclared identifier 'Rad_Settings' found instead

[vrb]

Awesome news!

I'm working with 3ds max, of course it more comfortable for me.

Tell me, is it possible to open an pov file in 3ds max?

Or how to convert pov2max or another supported format?

I also posted news about LDD2PovRay in our Ukrainian community UkrBricks.com

Thank you!

And my test image:

Sorry for my bad english.

[hrontos]

Awesome news!

I'm working with 3ds max, of course it more comfortable for me.

Tell me, is it possible to open an pov file in 3ds max?

Or how to convert pov2max or another supported format?

I also posted news about LDD2PovRay in our Ukrainian community UkrBricks.com

Thank you!

And my test image:

Sorry for my bad english.

Thank you for posting on UkrBricks.com.

POV-Ray is mainly raytracer no modeler, so for modeling there are much better tools. As far as I know, there are some modeling tools, that directly generate pov files, but reverse is very complicated and there is no tool available that can read and fully support POV-Ray script language. POV file generated by LDD2POVRay does not contain any usefull data, only colors and locations of bricks within the model, so it does not make sense to convert it to any software without coresponding brick library.

There were several reasons to select POV-Ray, but one of the main reasons is that it does not support export to other formats. It is not allowed to distribute brick geometries included in the LDD (that's LDD2POVRay uses virtual file system) so it is not legal to convert LDD model to any triangle mesh based modelling software.

[vrb]

Thank you for posting on UkrBricks.com.

POV-Ray is mainly raytracer no modeler, so for modeling there are much better tools. As far as I know, there are some modeling tools, that directly generate pov files, but reverse is very complicated and there is no tool available that can read and fully support POV-Ray script language. POV file generated by LDD2POVRay does not contain any usefull data, only colors and locations of bricks within the model, so it does not make sense to convert it to any software without coresponding brick library.

There were several reasons to select POV-Ray, but one of the main reasons is that it does not support export to other formats. It is not allowed to distribute brick geometries included in the LDD (that's LDD2POVRay uses virtual file system) so it is not legal to convert LDD model to any triangle mesh based modelling software.

Thanks for the detailed response!

So i will keep modeling bricks in 3d max.

By the way here is my render 3d max + V-ray render:

Image

Edited August 6, 2012 by Calabar
Oversized image converted in text link (maximum size allowed is 800x600)

[hrontos]

Thanks for the detailed response!

So i will keep modeling bricks in 3d max.

By the way here is my render 3d max + V-ray render:

Very nice soft lighting. Did you used some HDR image or V-ray supports some lighting box based lighting?

[vrb]

Very nice soft lighting. Did you used some HDR image or V-ray supports some lighting box based lighting?

I have not used HDRi, only two light sources(VRayLight plane based) with the VRay light properties:

Diffuse subdivs: 1500

Diffuse multiplier: 2.3

[Daiman]

Unfortunatelly the metallic, pearl and translucent materials are quite difficult to define. Mainly because their final appearance strongly depeneds on the lighting. So the current definitions of those materials are not very good, only some of them produce good results and sometimes only when not looking too closely. :-)

As Superkalle mentioned, if anybody has some proposals or better custom materials or color definitions, please, share them with us. More people can make more tests so we can have better materials sooner.

Thank you.

Can the 'Oily' effect be programatically blurred after it is processed but before it is rendered ??

[lisqr]

Fantastic tool!

Here's my first render.

and an instuction-style render.

[hjmediastudios]

How were you able to reverse-engineer the LDD file format? Any information (brief description, some ideas, source code) you could provide would greatly help me in creating an LDD-to-Blender exporter.

[WetWired]

Any tips for fast\nice lighting settings? I tried doing radiosity with AA last night and it literally didn't change past 42% overnight when it got to the transparent pieces. I ended up turning off radiosity and AA and quickly did one again this morning before I left for work. Obviously it doesn't look as nice...

Image

Edited August 7, 2012 by Calabar
Oversized image converted in text link (maximum size allowed is 800x600)

[Bobsy]

You know how it is, you start on a many-many-hours-long render, then realise all the other bits that your set needs. I've already added a tower with a trapdoor (got to have those action features...) in order to up the piece count to justify 4 minifigs and now need to render the whole thing again. Well, consider this a WIP preview. The 'shiny' gold colour doesn't come through particularly well here, and blends too much with the light tan bricks. Still, I'm pretty chuffed with how this turned out.

While I'm here, have a look at another WIP project - the Oldean Flurry speeder from Star Wars: The Old Republic.

A few jagged edges around the minifig there. Is this just something to put up with or can I minimise this?

[AwesomeTaylor]

I am sorry I will disappoint you, but I cannot tell you if the LDD to POV-Ray Converter can work on any windows "emulator" on Mac. It needs windows, .NET framework and it creates a virtual disk. I tested it also on virtual machine created using VMware and it works without problems but I have no idea if it is possible to run it on Mac using similar approach.

Parallels and VMWare on Mac don't emulate Windows - they are straight forward virtual machines and operate the same as if you had Windows installed via Boot Camp, or on a stand alone PC. They have direct hardware access, and are full Windows installations.

[hrontos]

Parallels and VMWare on Mac don't emulate Windows - they are straight forward virtual machines and operate the same as if you had Windows installed via Boot Camp, or on a stand alone PC. They have direct hardware access, and are full Windows installations.

This means, that it should work when installed in virtual machine just like it worked for me when installed in WinXP 32bit in VMware in Win7 64bit.

Image

You know how it is, you start on a many-many-hours-long render, then realise all the other bits that your set needs.

In case of minor errors I usually re-render only the problematic area of the image. POV-Ray allows you to specify exactly which rectangle should be rendered.

The 'shiny' gold colour doesn't come through particularly well here, and blends too much with the light tan bricks. Still, I'm pretty chuffed with how this turned out.

The gold and more general all metallic colors need something to reflect, otherwise they will always look like ordinary colors, since when there is nothing to reflect they reflect white background and this makes it look even more as standard plastic. So one step is to improve them and the second step is to provide some surrounding environment (usually by using some HDR image - HDRlabs is quite good source).

Image

A few jagged edges around the minifig there. Is this just something to put up with or can I minimise this?

The circles are still not perfectly smooth, so when looking too closely, they look like made of straight segments. I hope it can be improoved soon.

Any tips for fast\nice lighting settings? I tried doing radiosity with AA last night and it literally didn't change past 42% overnight when it got to the transparent pieces. I ended up turning off radiosity and AA and quickly did one again this morning before I left for work. Obviously it doesn't look as nice...

Image

Radiosity is good to get ambient lighting. It's difficult to achieve the same using different techniques in POV-Ray. AA and transparent pieces does not work well in POV-Ray. It is better to render at higher resolution, without AA and resize down in picture editor. Larger studed transparent pieces take forever no matter what settings are used. It looks like the key is to keep them small, so I will think about some automatic spliting of transparent parts (of course, without any visible consequences).

How were you able to reverse-engineer the LDD file format? Any information (brief description, some ideas, source code) you could provide would greatly help me in creating an LDD-to-Blender exporter.

Actually, as it was discussed many times, exporting brick data to any other format is considered to be a violation of LDD EULA.

We asked LDD Team for permission and conditions that we must fulfil to avoid legal consequences.

And the key requirement was to keep the brick data protected at least on the same level as in LDD.

This looked like impossible to do, since POV-Ray works only with plain text files. That's why we used the virtual filesystem.

Technically, it should be possible to the same with Blender. Problem is, that Blender allows you to save the model in other formats and this the moment, when LDD EULA gets violated.

Fantastic tool!

Here's my first render.

Image

and an instuction-style render.

Image

The instructions style render can be used with lowest quality settings on the Rendering tab. POV-Ray will use only plain flat colors, no shading and reflections so it will look even more as original instructions and take much shorter time to "render".

Of course, it is at least strange to use renderer to produce such images, but at this moment, this is the only application that can do it (except for LDD itself). And it was very easy to put there (except for the outlining algorithm, which is not that easy to create, but very simple once it is created). The Coloring pages style was just created as fun for my kids since they like the model printed and they can color it themself. As it was reported, it has a bug in the current release, but it will be fixed in next release.

In the future I would expect some standard building steps and picture generator, without all that parsing and other POV-Ray stuff for producing building guides.

Edited August 7, 2012 by hrontos

[hrontos]

Can the 'Oily' effect be programatically blurred after it is processed but before it is rendered ??

Yes, it will be removed in the next release. However, finetuning of those materials is still required.

[Bobsy]

In case of minor errors I usually re-render only the problematic area of the image. POV-Ray allows you to specify exactly which rectangle should be rendered.

Ah, I was being coy. The changes I meant were adding another 50% or so to the model. Re-rendering the whole thing with a whacking great tower on the side.

The circles are still not perfectly smooth, so when looking too closely, they look like made of straight segments. I hope it can be improoved soon.

Sorry, I should have been more specific - it's not poly count I'm bothered about - the fantastic texture and lighting effects mean you have to look carefully to spot an angular round piece. What I meant was jagged black marks around certain edges. I realise that they've pretty much vanished in resizing the image, so the problem's not exactly critical.

(incidentally Hrontos, you're an absolute legend for making this. It's ace)

I have noticed a weird recurring error that's just happened on my current in-progress render, and I've seen it happen before. A certain piece - single stud with a clip pointing straight up - is sometimes randomly rotated 90 degrees, which looks pretty odd when the thing it's holding is magically passing through it. If I re-render that segment, could it change? Or is the orientation of the piece fixed when it goes to PovRay?

You can see an example of this in the Winter Village render - two of the clips on the roof of the building on the right are doing this.

[legolijntje]

I have a question; is it possible to make the same program, but for LDraw?

I know one can import LDraw in ldd, but many parts aren't available in ldd...

[hrontos]

I have a question; is it possible to make the same program, but for LDraw?

I know one can import LDraw in ldd, but many parts aren't available in ldd...

I think yes. I do not know details of the LDRAW dat structure, but since it is also based on the triangle meshes, it should work also with LDRAW meshes. LDD has explicit information about stud locations, so it is much easier to replace them, but may be LDRAW also maintains this information.

Ah, I was being coy. The changes I meant were adding another 50% or so to the model. Re-rendering the whole thing with a whacking great tower on the side.

Sorry, I should have been more specific - it's not poly count I'm bothered about - the fantastic texture and lighting effects mean you have to look carefully to spot an angular round piece. What I meant was jagged black marks around certain edges. I realise that they've pretty much vanished in resizing the image, so the problem's not exactly critical.

(incidentally Hrontos, you're an absolute legend for making this. It's ace)

I have noticed a weird recurring error that's just happened on my current in-progress render, and I've seen it happen before. A certain piece - single stud with a clip pointing straight up - is sometimes randomly rotated 90 degrees, which looks pretty odd when the thing it's holding is magically passing through it. If I re-render that segment, could it change? Or is the orientation of the piece fixed when it goes to PovRay?

You can see an example of this in the Winter Village render - two of the clips on the roof of the building on the right are doing this.

Thank you for kind words.

Yes, rendering higher resolution and resizing down can help smoothing some edges, since the resizing averages some information so edges are not so sharp and jagged.

I am sorry, that part is my bug, I accidentaly set it as having possibility to randomly rotate at 90degrees steps to simulate random positioning during building. It is already corrected for the next release. Until then disable part position variance or remove the part from ldd_part_position_variances.inc.

[Cammo]

I'm not that good in all these path location things

What do I need to fill in my settings/path locations?

db.lif location: ???

output path for includes: ???

What does it even mean? And were can I find my db.lif's location?

[hrontos]

I'm not that good in all these path location things

What do I need to fill in my settings/path locations?

db.lif location: ???

output path for includes: ???

What does it even mean? And were can I find my db.lif's location?

db.lif location is suggested by the converter automatically. It is folder that can be access in windows by running Windows Explorer and typing "%appdata%\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer" as a folder path. Or click on Start, Run... and type "%appdata%\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer" there.

Output path for includes can by any path. Converter will create include files there. They can 1GB in total, so select some path where you can store 1GB.

[Longeye]

Great software! Thank You!

I installed this software and working perfectly.

My config: Core 2 duo 2GHz/4 GB RAM/ Win7 64 bit

On this config, with high resolution is slow a bit (the Pov-Ray of course).

[Bobsy]

An updated version of the model. As I said while it was rendering, one of the clips on the throne has rotated 90 degrees. But otherwise, I'm pretty chuffed with this!

Throne of Babylon by bobsy26, on Flickr

[JopieK]

Very nice, now a mac version :)

[Calabar]

Actually, as it was discussed many times, exporting brick data to any other format is considered to be a violation of LDD EULA.

We asked LDD Team for permission and conditions that we must fulfil to avoid legal consequences.

And the key requirement was to keep the brick data protected at least on the same level as in LDD.

This looked like impossible to do, since POV-Ray works only with plain text files. That's why we used the virtual filesystem.

Technically, it should be possible to the same with Blender. Problem is, that Blender allows you to save the model in other formats and this the moment, when LDD EULA gets violated.

With this explanation, now I can understand why there is a virtual filesystem and why a "portable" (stand alone) version is difficult to realize.

So the problem is related to the need to "hide" TLG geometries of bricks.

It is not possible to realize a module for powray that allow encrypted communication between the software and LDD2Powray?

[JopieK]

With this explanation, now I can understand why there is a virtual filesystem and why a "portable" (stand alone) version is difficult to realize.

So the problem is related to the need to "hide" TLG geometries of bricks.

It is not possible to realize a module for powray that allow encrypted communication between the software and LDD2Powray?

Yups LEGO is too much a close minded company just like Apple and Microsoft :( I think in the end they will all need to break up their narrow minded perspectives otherwise they will loose... I'm very much a LEGO and Apple fan (just got my Retina Macbook Pro), but I think open source will definitely be the future.

So: TLG, make everything CC, NC, SA... I really mis certain things like a good way to create instructions of custom models etc.