How do I add decorations?

[Itaria No Shintaku]

Hello,

I have browsed the subsection and found a lot of useful decorations for minifig torsos (in LDD 4.3.6 they really few) but I yet do not know how do I add them to my library for future re-use.

Can anybody explain me that? Thanks!

[Calabar]

LDD have a closed database, and don't allow to add custom decorations.

Anyway there are some "hidden" decorations inside LDD that you could use.

Look at the Section Index and search for the LDD Reference topic.

[CM4Sci]

Never mind. See your PM.

-Sci

Edited June 17, 2013 by CM4S

[pbat]

As Calabar hinted, there are quite a bunch of decorations in LDD 4.3.6, which are not available via GUI. And sadly, the reference topic thread links to a post that is a bit outdated and thus lacks a lot of the newer minifig decorations.

The most easy and convenient way to get a reusable collection of minifig decorations is to download the file "Total.lxf" from this thread and put it into the path "%appdata%\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer\userpalettes" (or the respective Mac equivalent described in that thread):

That way you get a custom brick collection you can reuse in your LDD projects -- as long as you don't use the "LDD Extended" theme, where this feature is not available; you may however switch the current theme via the "View"-menu.

Another opportunity to apply decorations not available via GUI is to manually edit the LXFML file:

Make a backup copy of your LXF file and rename it so that it gets the extension ".zip" (you have Windows to display the file extensions, of course).

Then unzip this zip file: You'll get a PNG thumbnail and a LXFML file: The latter are nothing but textfiles containing some XML. The detailed specification is available in the attachement to this post but you only have to care about the "decoration=" string: Parts which can be decorated, but currently have no decoration, contain the string

decoration="0"

If you replace the "0" with a valid decoration ID number, this brick is decorated with the corresponding decoration. Some bricks may have severeal decorations, such as

decoration="0,0"

or even

decoration="0,0,0"

The mapping between IDs and decorations as well as the decoration PNGs themselves are stored in the file "%appdata%\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer\db.lif"

Un-/repacking lif-files and extracting or replacing the decorations is a violation of LDD's EULA ("I. GRANT OF LICENSE: [...] You may NOT: [...] (ii) modify, translate, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble (except to the extent that this restriction is expressly prohibited by law) or create derivative works based upon the Software or Documentation; [...]") and thus not allowed to be discussed here according to the section rules. In other words: How to build an "LEGO Digital Designer LIF Extractor" is beyond the stuff that is suitable for this forum.

Edited June 18, 2013 by pbat