Comparison of LEGO rendering engines

[LegoFjotten]

12 hours ago, Scrubs said:

Make sure you have verified your account too as this is required.

Thank you, I don't even have an account so that must be it.

Edit: Alert, Maximum number of visible parts allowed: 1000. Guess that means Mecabricks is pay to render?

Edited September 15, 2018 by LegoFjotten

[Scrubs]

19 hours ago, LegoFjotten said:

Edit: Alert, Maximum number of visible parts allowed: 1000. Guess that means Mecabricks is pay to render?

Yes, as explained in another thread, I can not afford to pay for people. I invested in hardware and I still need to pay every month for power (and even a small render farm sucks a lot of it) and proper bandwidth among other things. So it is possible to render for free but with some limitations. More info about what you can and cannot do here: https://www.mecabricks.com/en/credits

Otherwise, you can still download the free addon for Blender that I made and use your own computer to render.

Edited September 16, 2018 by Scrubs

[Bricked1980]

On 9/15/2018 at 9:51 AM, LegoFjotten said:

Edit: Alert, Maximum number of visible parts allowed: 1000. Guess that means Mecabricks is pay to render?

Although you do have to pay to render in higher resolution and with more features it's not very expensive. I bought about £5 worth of credits which was enough to create over 25 images for my Lego Ideas project.

[LegoFjotten]

On 9/16/2018 at 6:51 AM, Scrubs said:

Yes, as explained in another thread, I can not afford to pay for people.

(snip) Otherwise, you can still download the free addon for Blender that I made and use your own computer to render.

That's fair enough, good to know that I can render locally if I want to.

A few suggestions based on the hurdles I ran into when trying to use Mecabricks to render a test model:

1) Instead of disabling the render button when you are not logged in, let it be enabled but show a simple dialog with "You must be logged in with a verified account to render your model" or similar - the same way you display a message when you have more than 1000 parts.

2) If possible, I think it would be better to have a link to an information page with information about rendering & costs in both the dialog suggest above and the current "1000 parts" dialog . This could be the credits page you linked earlier if you add a few lines of text along the lines of "Rendering smaller models is free on Mecabricks, but larger or higher resolutions models comes at a small cost. You can also render locally using my free Blender addon", as well as examples (showing the images) for a small (free) model, a medium complexity model, and a large complex model.

7 hours ago, Bricked1980 said:

Although you do have to pay to render in higher resolution and with more features it's not very expensive. I bought about £5 worth of credits which was enough to create over 25 images for my Lego Ideas project.

Maybe I will take a new look sometime in the future. The models I'm working on now are all way more than 1000 parts, and I usually spend some time tweaking camera views and doing quick renders to find the most flattering angles, and in the end they are still just for sketch use. I think continuing with LDD + BlueRender is a better fit for my current needs.

No doubt the Mecabricks renders are better though, so if my needs change I know where to go.

[MarkUK]

Is it possible to get some depth-of-field variation in Eyesight? Doesn't seem to be anything in the pre-render menu that I can find...