LDD crashes over 40-50 thousand bricks

[milovan]

Sorry to jump in in to this unrelated topic for my issue, but i am new and cant handle forums well.

I am fun of building huge Lego projects, but when my lego projects suppress over 40 000 - 50 000 bricks LDD always crushes.

Is there any mod or any other way to go around and remove this brick limit?

Please reply and thank you!

[dandexter]

I keen to see what your 40,000+ piece projects are? Sounds interesting.

Also, all I can suggest is breaking it into multiply smaller modules or sections store in separate LDD files. Unfortunately you wouldn't see it assembled though.

[obsidianheart]

I think part of it also has to do with the system specifications of the computer you're running it on. I have a file that is something like 16,000 plus bricks, and on my old, antiquated machine, the file chugs along and has a 15 second delay between clicking an action and the actual response. However, on my friend's high-end gaming PC, the file behaves relatively normally.

Also pretty curious about a 40,000 piece project over here!

[legolijntje]

There's nothing you can really do about that. I think your best "solution" would be to split your complete model into a few files. For example, if you are building a house, make a file for the first floor, a file for the second floor, a file for the third floor etc

[Judah Nielsen]

One "workaround" I've found is to render multiple files together using POV-Ray, which seems to have slightly better performance. For instance, on a computer that crashes out at around 30,000 pieces in LDD, I can render scenes of at least 56,000 pieces in POV-Ray (though this used something like 8GB of RAM on my 12GB system, whereas I don't think RAM is the limiting issue in LDD. Depending on your machine's specs, it may not buy you as much headroom).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laluneetmoi/7657121986/ - 4 ships which together total 56,000 pieces. The largest of these is actually a hollow shell of around 26,000 pieces, because I couldn't get LDD to save and operate on a file containing the interior.

However, this has a few limitations: You can really only use this for the final step (rendering), so if you are rendering a single unified model instead of a multi-model scene like this, you have to build very carefully so that things will all line up, you may have to reposition the camera in POV-Ray, and this is a complicated exercise that you can only be sure of after a fairly intense render (since even making a 300 x 200 render to make sure you placed things correctly will mean sitting through a very long parse period).

The basic procedure works something like this:

1.) In a new blank LDD model, place a grid on the ground level that is as long and as wide as your final model will be.

2.) For each piece of the final model, import it into the grid and place it in the correct position.

3.) Save this as a brand new file.

4.) Reload the original grid file, and repeat 2 & 3 until you've created all of the part models.

5.) Now go back through each part file and remove the grid, so it doesn't render in POV-Ray.

6.) Process each lxf file through LDDtoPOV.

7.) In POV-Ray, copy and paste each model together so that your final model is a union of all of the parts.

8.) If you weren't able to keep the same camera angle in the parts, you'll need to reposition the camera in POV-Ray, which is pretty tricky, but some advice on camera positioning has been given in the LDD to POV thread here.

9.) Test render and hope you haven't mis-positioned, mis-copied, or otherwise botched this complicated procedure.

LDD performance at large part sizes has long frustrated me, and when I worked out this method (with the help of the ever-resourceful hrontos), I thought it was going to open up my building to bigger and better things, but it turned out to be far too much work to keep my interest. But maybe you have more drive than I do and this will be helpful.

[squiddos]

Yeah I was trying to work on a lego scene that has 18K bricks in it. When I go to add another thousand it crashes. Any ideas?

[squiddos]

Yeah I was trying to work on a lego scene that has 18K bricks in it. When I go to add another thousand it crashes. Any ideas?

I did install an older version 4.1.7, yeah couple years old. I was able to work on my scene and surpass the 18K cut off. Now I am just dealing with things that have no parts, because of the age of LDD. Anyone here have any cut off points with the new LDD?

[Superkalle]

I'm not aware if there any changes in 4.3.8 that reduces the amount of bricks you can view. So should be the same amount as discussed previously in this topic.

[Nachapon Lego]

Maybe it is limit by polygons not by quantity of bricks.

For example:

Some tools can capture polygons in graphic card's RAM and count.

A 1x1 tile = 44 polygons.

A 48x48 baseplate = 83,004 polygons.

A LXF with 1,600+ Mr. gold minifig = 5,548,625 polygons. Tried to paste 100 more Mr gold cause LDD crash. (RAM 8Gb, VRAM 2Gb_dedicated + 2Gb_shared_from_sys)

Not sure more RAM or VRAM will help or not. If your system have more RAM/VRAM you can try to build as many Mr Gold as you can for experiment.

Edited December 8, 2013 by bbqqq

[Dilvish]

Take a look at this:

[Superkalle]

Take a look at this:

I'm not sure I follow what you want to communicate Dilvish

The topic is about viewing many bricks in LDD, not Ldraw (which in this respect probably is much better then LDD).

A 1x1 tile = 44 polygons.

A 48x48 baseplate = 83,004 polygons.

Hm, why does a 48x48 baseplate have so many more polygons in memory. The LDD gemoetry itself probably doesn't have more then 2100 or so I would assume (44x48)?

[Calabar]

Hm, why does a 48x48 baseplate have so many more polygons in memory. The LDD gemoetry itself probably doesn't have more then 2100 or so I would assume (44x48)?

Maybe because of the great number of studs?

48x48=2304 studs, with 30 triangular meshes for each one, reach about 70 thousand triangles for studs only.

Edited December 8, 2013 by Calabar

[Nachapon Lego]

Hm, why does a 48x48 baseplate have so many more polygons in memory. The LDD gemoetry itself probably doesn't have more then 2100 or so I would assume (44x48)?

Maybe because of the great number of studs?

48x48=2304 studs, with 30 triangular meshes for each one, reach about 70 thousand triangles for studs only.

Stud in LDD is a 12 faces cylinder without bottom surface = 36 polygons.

So all studs of a 48x48 base plate = 36x48x48 = 82,944 polygons, The remaining polygons are for big flat plate with round corners.

But if connect something on it, the hidden stud/faces will reduce the polygon count.

ie:

Two seperate 1x1 bricks = 64 x 2 =128 polygons.

But Two connect 1x1 bricks = 74 polygons.

Edited December 8, 2013 by bbqqq

[Superkalle]

Maybe because of the great number of studs?

Ha, ha....yes...the reason is my brain is failing me and I can't calculate 48x48

[Vee]

Although we have been buying Lego products for our two daughters since 2006 (only around 2-3 products a year), I became a kind-of Lego addicted very very recently, when I decided to rebuild all the Legos my daughters had and that were disassembled, mixed, forgotten and stored in a box. So, with me sorting out the pieces and my younger daughter making the builds, we managed to rebuild them. Some pieces were missing so I found Pick a Brick and bought what I could find. Also used ebay and later I found about Bricklink. I am still waiting for some purchases to arrive.

So, after building the sets and searching the internet, I found about the modular buildings and fell in love with them. But, soon I realized that I could not have the first 3 buildings. No way I will ever be paying what they are worth these days.

So I have this cabinet here in my office that I then decided to use as a Lego showroom for modular buildings Well, not the cabinet, but its roof. On top of the cabinet, there is an area of roughly 71"x16" and my plan is to fill this area with the Modular Buildings atop a platform that will be slightly inclined towards the viewer.

I am then building a "preview" in LDD of what I will do in this area. I have added all the modular buildings that are available (all but the first 3, since I just recently bought the now sold out Fire Brigade) and my file has now around 14k pieces..Here is what I have so far:

As you can see, there is an opening, reserved for the Parisian Restaurant, and, because I have the area for just one more building and because I like the haunted house a lot (I like also its colors, they complement well the current buildings I have or will have), I added it to the layout, as a corner, since it has 3 finished sides, with a gap between it and the Palace Cinema, like if it was an alley. I am working on the Haunted House, adding some more things to integrate it better. For instance, I had to create a platform to raise it a little so that I can open it (from behind). I had to add a baseplate to make it on the same level as the other modulars, and I am adding a small cemetery, some "rocks" around it, a crooked sidewalk, more fence, and the Werewolf set. I love the tree from the Werewolf set. The haunted house has an extra 8-stud wide area to its right. That is how I have this now 14k LDD file.

With the above layout, I found that I don't need any of the 3 first buildings (although I still would like A LOT to have them) which made me less sorry for not having them. The problem is that I will not have space for the future modular buildings (2015 and beyond) but that is a "problem" to be solved when the right time comes...For now I am very happy with my layout because it will cover all the area I have atop my cabinet.

OK, so after this looooong introduction, what I want to tell is that I have been dealing with the buggy LDD since my file became this big. The bigger problem is that sometimes LDD will just vanish, close itself without any warning, losing any modification not saved, making me very angry. It can happen when I add something (like a baseplate!) or, the worst and more common, when I click the Save button. Instead of saving the modifications, it will vanish and lose all of them.

What I have found that seems to help is to keep saving the file constantly. I think that because when you save the file it will purge the history (the undo button is grayed out), a lot of stuff that LDD has to keep track is removed from memory and then LDD would become "lighter" and "stabler". If I don't save for a while, that is prone to the "vanishing problem", specially if the Undo has some big actions in the history (like moving a big section). Also, I hide all the other houses when working in a certain house.

My system is not old. It is a 4-core i7 (2600k), 16GB of RAM, etc... CPU never gets higher usage than 30-40%, usually always much lower than that (10%), so I am pretty sure my system is not to blame. I guess LDD only uses one core, not programmed for multi-core.

The truth is although LDD is a great and invaluable application under some point-of-views, it just sucks under other POVs.

[squiddos]

Yeah I created this scene with a lot of road base plates maybe 40 of em at least. The PC I am running on is not too old, 1045T, 12GB RAM, 128SSD, and a ATI 6850 XXX 1GB. I tried loading it up on my laptop as well, and it crashes, its only a year old. But like I said once I installed the older version, it worked no problem. if anything, it ran faster too. I have not used LDD in a week now because of this obstacle. I turned the graphics down and everything, updated drivers, nothing. Any suggestions?

[Marckeyh]

I have used LDD to make a MOC of 150.000 bricks. I had also noticed the program becomes very unstable once you go over 20.000 parts. Sometimes it crashes when you save, making your file corrupt.

I've made my MOC out of approx 50 separate parts. This helped with the crashing problem, but I had to design it that way anyway, because I needed to be able to transport it.

I believe this problem could be fixed, if they would make a 64bit version.

Multi-core support would be great, especially when calculating building plans!

[AndyC]

LDD actually is multi-threaded (as can be seen in Task Manager) but the problem runs deeper than that as the algorithms used by LDD to calculate viable connections apparently don't lend themselves to be easily parallelised. Furthermore LDD was designed around building small models for purchase by Design-By-Me customers, it simply isn't built in a way that's designed to scale up to huge digital designs like these and it's unlikely it would be without major redesigns.

If you want to build big with digital designs, you really need to go with something LDraw based.

[squiddos]

How hard is LDraw, and can I import my models?

[squiddos]

How hard is LDraw, and can I import my models?

Also why would an older version of LDD work, and run faster than the new one?

[Lego Otaku]

LDraw has a rather steep learning curve compared to LDD but you can do a lot more, mostly because LDraw usually has all but the newer pieces.

Importing can be done but it rarely works well because some details get lost in translation like angle and orientation of each parts, the position of flexable items, and newer parts that are in LDD but not in LDraw won't carry over.

It may be easier to try and recreate from scratch so you don't have to worry about oddly positioned parts hiding out of sight or other problem.

[squiddos]

Would you know why the older version of LDD works no problem?

[Dilvish]

FYI, I wouldn't use SR 3D Builder for large models since it tries to calculate connections between bricks like LDD does. LDCad and MLCAD will work OK though.

Also, if you plan ahead you can build your models in sections and join them together later using POV-Ray. You can do this even if you are using LDD.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Dilvish

[AndyC]

Would you know why the older version of LDD works no problem?

Probably just down to parts having a lower polygon count in older versions, but it could be just about anything.

[squiddos]

At the time I was just building to build and then my creativity just went off and made an airbase that was being attacked. Like a still image of what I am seeing in my head. I am far from finished, only at 18K blocks..but I might remove some base plates.