Mecabricks Viewport Upgrade

[Scrubs]

For the past 2 months I worked on a re-design of the viewport code. I took the opportunity to improve the real time rendering quality and add lots of customisation options. Here are a few of these:

• Shaded or wireframe mode
• HDRI, flat or matcap lighting
• Single Color or Materials
• Multiple edge calculation type options (boundaries, wire, etc)
• Background Color or HDRI
• Environment reflection activated or not
• X-Ray mode
• Save these settings for your Mecabricks account
• etc.

 

Rendering mode improvements:

• Accurate floor material in viewport
• Accurate HDRI lighting in viewport (image, rotation, strength)

 

This is just the start and much more will be available at the start of 2019. Follow this link to start building: https://www.mecabricks.com/en/workshop/ 

Here is a short video showing how to use the viewport options:

 

Edited December 16, 2018 by Scrubs

[Calabar]

Glad to see that the project is so viable.

Any improvement aimed to the use with touch devices? I haven't followed the development of Mecabricks for some time, and I was wondering how far the "touch experience" went.

[Scrubs]

This is fully functional on the latest version of iOS for iPad. Nothing is missing. Mobile phone screens are too small but tablets are perfect.

I just added one last option for this year, you can show or hide the LEGO logo on studs in the viewport - It requires a lot of calculations so use smartly.

Edited December 17, 2018 by Scrubs

[Calabar]

That's a good news for me, I should try it on my Android Tablet (hoping the graphics is not too heavy for its "old" Snapdragon 801 SOC).
Is it good with Firefox for Android?

[Renderbricks]

Fantastic work and evolution of the best and most powerful LEGO® editor.

[The_Director]

I am just going to leave this here:

Mechabricks is a good program, however it has faults that for my workflow are worrisome, and might not work for you:

1. Exporting mesh is much better than Stud.IO. Its cleaner, and and its normal's are facing correctly.

However, the materials are only listed as numbers, so green could be Color 223 (just placing an random number here) Where as Stud.io will export with materials listing their name. I have an image of official LEGO colors that I can match the material names to, and a random number does not work. (for my workflow)

2. Mechabricks Does not have all of the parts as Stud.io has. Not the end of the road, as I am sure that they are adding more bricks every day, however I don't have time to wait for Mecha to add the one brick I need for my project, and I dont want to switch between programs to handle missing pieces. (and I've taken several looks, and they are missing many common pieces)

3. Their rendering sucks. Sorry, but it just does. No kid wants to pay for a render, or understands what they are doing paying for a render farm. Get Blender. Its free. Use Sheepit, thats also free! Lastly go and get your own HDRI map, there are many places to get free maps!

This one kinda boils my blood a bit as its in my mind a deceptive cheat. You set up all of the settings only to discover that you have to pay to get an rendered image. And then on top of that you will most likely realize that you forgot to change a setting or you have a bad camera angle and now you just burned your cash. Mecha works on whats called a render farm. you send them a file that they then render the animation inside the file over many computers. Its an waste of cash as you could easily set up the scene in a program such as Blender (its free!) and render all year long without spending a penny. And if you need a project done quickly (which is the only reason you need a render farm) then use a program such as "Sheep it" which is a points based rendering outfit. You run your PC while your away and it gathers points, and then you spend those points on your project. It's just an better way of running an animation project.

 

4. Lastly, the program is online based. If I am workign away from internet access (which is rare) then I loose the program. At best I can download an exported version of the file. (which does work)

 

These are the reason the program does not work for me. I am more than willing to try mecha again in the future when more bricks are released, however it is unusable in the mean time.

 

T_D

[legolijntje]

7 hours ago, The_Director said:

Their rendering sucks. Sorry, but it just does. No kid wants to pay for a render, or understands what they are doing paying for a render farm. Get Blender. Its free. Use Sheepit, thats also free! Lastly go and get your own HDRI map, there are many places to get free maps!

Exporting to Blender is free and if you know your way around Blender, you can do everything you can pay for, for free and that's perfectly fine. Many users however, don't have the knowledge nor the computer horsepower to do that and that's who the feature is mainly (I think) for. You can pay for the knowledge, time-saving and the rendering hardware, not the render itself.

I mean, that's the case with almost everything that costs money. For example, I can also build my own furniture. But then I have to spend time learning about how to build proper furniture, not to mention that my first set would probably look real ugly. I could also go to a store, buy some pre-made furniture and be done (and happy) with it. If you don't wanna pay for that, or just enjoy the experience of building it yourself, no problem whatsoever either.

[The_Director]

5 hours ago, legolijntje said:

Exporting to Blender is free and if you know your way around Blender, you can do everything you can pay for, for free and that's perfectly fine. Many users however, don't have the knowledge nor the computer horsepower to do that and that's who the feature is mainly (I think) for. You can pay for the knowledge, time-saving and the rendering hardware, not the render itself.

I mean, that's the case with almost everything that costs money. For example, I can also build my own furniture. But then I have to spend time learning about how to build proper furniture, not to mention that my first set would probably look real ugly. I could also go to a store, buy some pre-made furniture and be done (and happy) with it. If you don't wanna pay for that, or just enjoy the experience of building it yourself, no problem whatsoever either.

Again, not to cause any stress, but I clearly posted that in MY workflow, mecha sucks. Also again, for new users to even mecha, each render costs cash. So if you make a mistake, you still have to pay, if your lucky you will get it right on the first try. Mecha does not do any (or at least they don't advertise it) proof checking of your rendering. That's why it does not work for MY workflow, and thats why I cannot recommend it to even beginners. Heck build the model and Ill render it for you! (for free!)

[Calabar]

4 hours ago, The_Director said:

Again, not to cause any stress, but I clearly posted that in MY workflow, mecha sucks. Also again, for new users to even mecha, each render costs cash.

Pardon me, but I can't understand your point too (and your language, "sucks" is not something I expect to read in this forum).

The "server farm rendering" is an option. I think that it is an useful option for people that are not familiar with rendering software, for people with much hurry (render farm is usually much faster than any home PC), for those who haven't any hardware suitable with the operation (I know many people that have a very old PC or even uses only a tablet... and don't forget that Mecabricks is the only one suitable from mobile/touch devices).
If you don't belong to one of these cases, you can simply ignore this option and export your rendering file for blender. Does it interfere with your workflow in any way?
Besides if I remember correctly, low resolution renderings are for free, so you can do as much try you need before paying for the final rendering.

About available parts, surely stud.io is better stocked. This is not a surprise, as it uses LDRAW bricks as basis, anche the LDRAW community is very active. On the other hand, Mecabricks redesigned the parts in a new and more modern format, and this requires a lot of work. I think that it is possible to contribute too, so if you need a part, you could create it and share it with all Mecabricks users. Maybe it is possible to request parts too.
Anyway I can understand that for a standard user this is a clear limit (LDD is much worse from this point of view) so, as usual, the impact depends on one's needs.

About being a web app, there isn't much to say: this is Mecabricks. It has advantages, but disadvantages too. Everyone should judge if the weight of advantages is greater or lesser than disadvantages one. Clearly if your Internet access is slow or you need to use it offline, it is not the software for you.

Edited December 31, 2018 by Calabar

[The_Director]

I could not get the low resolution rendering to work without cash (which is where I stopped)

 

otherwise we we appear to agree on everything else. 

 

Again I am sorry if my wording is low grade. 

[saabfan]

On 12/31/2018 at 2:54 AM, The_Director said:

3. Their rendering sucks. Sorry, but it just does. No kid wants to pay for a render, or understands what they are doing paying for a render farm. Get Blender. Its free. Use Sheepit, thats also free! Lastly go and get your own HDRI map, there are many places to get free maps!

Just going to leave this here which was made single-handedly by Carlierti using Mecabricks, Blender and Sheepit: 

 

[Renderbricks]

 

On 12/31/2018 at 8:46 PM, The_Director said:

I could not get the low resolution rendering to work without cash (which is where I stopped)

 

otherwise we we appear to agree on everything else. 

 

Again I am sorry if my wording is low grade. 

Looks like we have a tragic user error here of the mimimillennial generation. ;-)

And yes: The rendering is THE shit. ;-)

Edited January 2, 2019 by Renderbricks

[Scrubs]

On 1/1/2019 at 3:29 AM, The_Director said:

Heck build the model and Ill render it for you! (for free!)

Good luck with that 

Mecabricks renders hundreds of files everyday and most nodes work non-stop 24/7. Almost 50K images have been rendered in the past year.

And yes it is possible to render for free. This is what 90% of the renders are. Also proof checking your render with a low resolution and low samples before the final version is either free or in the worse case costs a couple of cents.

By the way, my system is all based on Blender which I support via their funds.

On 12/31/2018 at 2:54 PM, The_Director said:

Its an waste of cash as you could easily set up the scene in a program such as Blender (its free!) and render all year long without spending a penny.

 I can show you my spreadsheet with the power consumption and cost - I use dedicated power meters to monitor my usage. I can assure you that a computer with decent specs which is rendering (100% CPU and 100% GPU) is using a lot of it!

Edited January 17, 2019 by Scrubs