program like POV-RAY for LDD

[bricklayer]

How can I create "life like" images of my LDD designs.

Ive tempered with MLCAD and found that you can use POV-RAY(after converting and what not)

Just wondering if there is any program like that for LDD.

Thanks,

[Lalror]

POV-RAY is what you call a renderer, it basically takes your models from the boring simple graphics options and allows you to edit lighting and everything to make the model look exactly how you want it. There are a number of these available and they are all good. What you need in LDD to use these is more export options. Some of the popular 3D file types include 3ds., blend., skp., etc. I hope lego expands the features that LDD has in the future and this is on a long line of features that I hope to see.

[Brickdoctor]

LDD is the renderer. It's built in and renders the models in real-time.

[Superkalle]

If I understand bricklayer correctly, he was asking if there are any raytracing apps for LDD that can produce images like with POV-RAY. And the quick answer is unfortuntely no.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) Unlike LDraw, geometries in LDD is not in an open format, so they are not available for 3rd parties to play around with. The only open aspect of LDD is at the moment the LXF file format.

2) The LDD geometries are natively in OpenGL-format in LDD, and even if there was a way to extract them, converting to a more generic format like 3DS is not easy. However, there is a cool tool that will extract and create 3D XML files discussed here, but even so, you still have the problem of converting to a more generic format.

3) The geometries are quite simple in LDD, i.e. there is for example no modelled bevels on the edges. This means that bricks will appear quite flat even if ray-traced. I know there was some dicussions if and how you could add bevels programatically after extracting the geometries (bascially using the same algorithm that LEGO uses to create the brick edge outlines in LDD), but I'm not sure how far that went.

[bricklayer]

If I understand bricklayer correctly, he was asking if there are any raytracing apps for LDD that can produce images like with POV-RAY. And the quick answer is unfortuntely no.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) Unlike LDraw, geometries in LDD is not in an open format, so they are not available for 3rd parties to play around with. The only open aspect of LDD is at the moment the LXF file format.

2) The LDD geometries are natively in OpenGL-format in LDD, and even if there was a way to extract them, converting to a more generic format like 3DS is not easy. However, there is a cool tool that will extract and create 3D XML files discussed here, but even so, you still have the problem of converting to a more generic format.

3) The geometries are quite simple in LDD, i.e. there is for example no modelled bevels on the edges. This means that bricks will appear quite flat even if ray-traced. I know there was some dicussions if and how you could add bevels programatically after extracting the geometries (bascially using the same algorithm that LEGO uses to create the brick edge outlines in LDD), but I'm not sure how far that went.

Thats what I mean.

Thanks for all the reply's!! Questions answered