Upper limit on parts?

[DraikNova]

So, I've come up with some ideas for a LDD project, when I started to wonder; how much can LDD handle? Even my original plan was to make this project modular, but even so the largest module is 500 by 1000 studs wide (3 by 6 meters), and probably at least 100 bricks tall (90 centimetres) at some points. In your experience, when does LDD start to go haywire with large projects?

After seeing the 13-foot Super Star Destroyer and hearing about it requiring 2 LDD files, I'm beginning to question whether LDD is even capable of rendering things at this size. I would hate to have to switch to some new program I'm not used to, but it'll probably be necessary.

Thoughts?

Edited January 9, 2014 by DraikNova

[pbat]

Nobody can tell you a definite upper border, since it pretty much depends on the system used. On an elderly notebook it may crash with as little as 3000 parts, while some souped-up workstations may cope well with 100000 bricks and more. A system that's designed for good CAD handling is more likely to handle large LDD sets than a consumer tablet of the 299 bucks class. An AMD FirePro or Nvidia Quadro graphics board thus might be a good investment, if you plan to make really large sets. A processor with more cores, or more RAM, however, will do little good: LDD does not use multiple CPU cores well, but seems to be single-threaded, as far as I've observed it.

By the way, it's not so much the part count that matters, but rather the amount of polygons to be displayed: An additional 48x48 baseplate is much more critical than a 1x1 flat tile. And transparent colours are more harmful than solid ones.

Anyway, save your file quite often! If LDD reaches the limit of bricks it can handle on that particular system, it will crash without warning or chance to save your work.

[Calabar]

Recently bbqqq extimated that there is a limit due to the number of polygons involved.

See the topic LDD crashes over 40-50 thousand bricks just below.

[DraikNova]

That polygon problem is exactly what I'm asking about. The 13-foot SSD is large enough that it LDD can't handle any more polygons, and my project is quite a bit bigger in terms of length and width. Does LeoCAD (is that the right name?) or another program allow for larger builds than that?

[Nachapon Lego]

Maybe you can build sub-models in LDD and save as many files, then export and assembly them in Ldraw MLCad or SR 3D builder etc.

I am working on an experiment, using excel to join LDD files then go render with ldd2povray directly.

Edited January 9, 2014 by bbqqq

[Lego Otaku]

My computer has dual XEON and lots of memory but it still had a hard time opening half that 13 feet long super star destroyer. Part of the issue is that LDD uses one core so my overpowered gaming machine were only using about 4% of maximum potential while running LDD. I do hope that LEGO would do something about that and make future LDD able to use multi-core. Then I could probably do over 1 million bricks before my machine starts slowing down.

Right now try to keep it under 10k parts for most modern machine and smaller for older machines.

[DraikNova]

Maybe you can build sub-models in LDD and save as many files, then export and assembly them in Ldraw MLCad or SR 3D builder etc.

I am working on an experiment, using excel to join LDD files then go render with ldd2povray directly.

That'd still break the polygon limit. It isn't (only) the amount of parts (it'll be almost exclusively hollow, with the internals built as a separate segment), but sheer size that's going to stop me from building this.

EDIT: Let me state this question differently: what is the part limit in LDraw, if there is an absolute maximum?

Edited January 10, 2014 by DraikNova