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Hello guys , 

I desperately need a stud.io expert's help : I am doing builds for Star Wars factions using LDD and stud.io and I've stumbled upon some roadblocks in my use of Stud.io. Namely

1) I cannot find any way to make parts that are supposed to be dual-molded be two different colors. For example I want a minifig's legs to be tan in their upper area , with dark bluish grey as the "boots"/lower part. Another example is a doctor who sonic screwdriver - I want the "body" to be pearl grey but the "light bulb" on top to be a trans green or trans blue . Is there any way , direct or indirect , to achieve that ?

2) What I also looked for , but could not find , was a way to use my own custom decals on , say a minifig torso . Is there any way of accessing the decoration/decal database of the programm and adding my own / replacing an existing one with my own ? 

If this has been answered / covered elsewhere , feel free to lock / delete the topic and point me to the right direction. Thanks in advance to anyone kind enough to help.

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Caped Crusader;

I'm pretty sure neither of these can be done yet. Post the request on the forum and maybe it will be gotten to.

Ed

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Hey mate,

I use Stud.io for 3d Modeling, and unfortunately, the stickers are actually part of the 3d model (they are not a texture!) I don't know but most likely LDD is the same.

The issue will be the same for duel molded parts. Stud.io does make duel molded windows (the part is one color, the glass is another) however I've not seen any progress made on duel molded.

What is your end goal exactly? just trying to build up LDD or stud.io's library?

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Studio is a pretty LDraw wrapper so you can make custom decorations by adding them to the part and saving it as a new part and putting it in the Studio progam folder under ldraw/Custom Parts/Parts then it will be in the drop down under master as "Custom parts"

I believe that you can use this same trick to have dual molded legs, as they exist in the ldraw library. 

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Thanks so much for the help , all 3 of you :sweet:. @The_Director My goal is just to build my scenes for the Star Wars factions community project on LDD ( as I'm used to it and it's tools more by now ) , then import them into Stud.io ( maybe add a couple of things using parts not available in LDD ) hopefully managing to apply my custom decals to my characters and then using the amazing rendering Stud.io provides to make them look as real as possible, and use said renders as "comic panels" for my stories in Factions. @supertruper1988 that's pretty smart ! How exactly would I do that ? Meaning how would I edit the DAT file ( at least I assume that's what I have to do to ) of say a torso with existing decoration A (or maybe just use the plain one?) to change it to custom decoration B ? Also , under where did you find the dual molded legs in the LDraw library ? Again , a big thank you to everyone for the quick and very useful tips :wink:

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2 minutes ago, Kendo said:

@The_Director@supertruper1988How exactly would I do that ? Meaning how would I edit the DAT file ( at least I assume that's what I have to do to ) of say a torso with existing decoration A (or maybe just use the plain one?) to change it to custom decoration B ?

The tool of choice to create new LDraw patterns is LDPatternCreator https://sourceforge.net/projects/patterncreator/files/

With it, you create a new pattern by adding colored triangles, using a background image of the torso as guide. Many LDraw tools does support the more direct texture mapping of image, but AFAIK Studio doesn't allow it yet.

Quote

Also , under where did you find the dual molded legs in the LDraw library ?

AFAIK they don't exist yet. Do you have a link to this part on Brickset or Bricklink?

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Damn , Windows only ( I use Mac and Linux :laugh: ). Guess I'll need to borrow someone's laptop . The part I'm referring to is any pair of legs with two colors molded in them one on the upper part and one on the lower. This and this are some examples. Thank you so much for the assist !

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On 12/31/2018 at 6:54 PM, Kendo said:

The part I'm referring to is any pair of legs with two colors molded in them one on the upper part and one on the lower.

These legs have been missing from LDraw library for a too long time... Some of them (red and blue) are now available on LDraw parts tracker: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptscan.cgi?q=boots

Don't forget the subparts!

Edit: please wait a bit, I managed to goof in design number, should be 20460/20461, not 24060/24061. Renumbering proceeding...

Edited by Philo

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Thank you so much @Philo ! I think it's me doing something wrong here , but I'm guessing it's not normal for the parts to appear like this is it ? Is there any way I can fix this ?

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@Kendo Have you downloaded and installed all 4 subparts? (s\20460s0x.dat, x[1..4]) The block with question mark means that the part or one of its subparts is missing, neither in regular library nor in custom parts. The subparts must be placed in CustomParts\Parts\s

It can work... legs.jpg
...sort of :(
As you can see, pre-colored boot is not correctly shaded. But this is clearly a bug in Studio, as this happens also with "normal" parts in Studio library. Here is an example with precolored arms torso (973c02) and the "released" version, with separated arms and hands
shaderbug.jpg

Edited by Philo

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Got it ! You are amazing my friend ! From a bit of meddling with the DAT files I gathered that the second field in the 12th line of 20460p02.dat is the one that controls the color , right ? I'm testing different values trying to get the boots to be metallic silver. Is there any chart/file where I can see the color values ? Also , does something similar already exist for dual molded arms too ?

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45 minutes ago, Kendo said:

Got it ! You are amazing my friend ! From a bit of meddling with the DAT files I gathered that the second field in the 12th line of 20460p02.dat is the one that controls the color , right ?

Yes exatly. 20460s02.dat is the "boot" subpart, whose color is controlled by the second number. You can see more details on LDraw file format here: http://www.ldraw.org/article/218.html

Quote

Is there any chart/file where I can see the color values ?

Yes! See here: http://www.ldraw.org/article/547.html. Note that there are several silver colors defined, most probably you can choose color code 80 ("painted" silver) or 135 (silver plastic, slightly translucent)

Quote

Also , does something similar already exist for dual molded arms too ? 

Yes also, look for 3818p01 and 3819p01 (Minifig Arm Right with Short Sleeve and Yellow Arm Pattern). The subparts (3818p01s01.dat and 3818p01s02.dat) are official for a long time, so they are present in Studio library.

Edited by Philo

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@Philo Thanks to your tons of help , I have successfully created my minifig , with dual molded arms , boots etc. What I ended up doing is just using the two sub parts as seperate parts inside my library , and I then colored them accordingly in stud.io and simply aligned them carefully and then "combined" them into one part. That way I didn't have to deal with the color glitch ... I did create some pre-made legs in different colors for future use however. Now my only problem is that although I did manage to get LDPatternCreator on a friend's laptop , my designs for the "decals" have many curves and intricacies , and are impossible to recreate using it ( as it only allows up to a certain amount of precision , I'm sure you know ). I remember you mentioned other options when it comes to texture mapping . What are these options ? Is there anything I can use to photorealistically render something I built on Stud.io ( probably via another Ldraw tool as you mentioned that there isn't one for Stud.io ) with my decal designs mapped to the surfaces of the torso , legs etc ? Again , a big thank you for all your help , I couldn't do any of this without it !

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Quote

What I ended up doing is just using the two sub parts as seperate parts inside my library , and I then colored them accordingly in stud.io and simply aligned them carefully and then "combined" them into one part. That way I didn't have to deal with the color glitch

Way yo go to get around this rendering bug!

5 hours ago, Kendo said:

my designs for the "decals" have many curves and intricacies , and are impossible to recreate using it ( as it only allows up to a certain amount of precision , I'm sure you know )

I agree that LDPC can be a nightmare for intricate patterns! In this case texture mapping is the only sensible way to do things. But you can change LDPC grid (change "Move Snap" to a lower value, eg. 10 instead of default 100). Can you share an image of one of your decals?

To come back to texture mapping... definition is here: http://www.ldraw.org/documentation/ldraw-org-file-format-standards/language-extension-for-texture-mapping.html and you can see an example usage in my EV3 stickers: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptscan.cgi?q=sticker+mindstorms

But as I said previously, AFAIK Studio doesn't support TEXMAP extension. If POV renderer is fine with you, texmap is correctly exported by LDView or LDCAD. Photorealistic renderer of Studio is said to be a customized version of Blender renderer, so this direction can be investigated. See https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-22780.html?highlight=blender for a LDraw to Blender conversion tool. Dunno if it supports TEXMAP, and here I'm clearly outside my comfort zone :hmpf_bad:

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Hello @Philo, and sorry for the late reply, the last couple of weeks were full or work , no time for building / rendering :sceptic:. However I had some time today and after tackling a couple of technical issues and even fixing up some code , I managed to set up Pov-Ray for my mac . So I currently have my model opened up in Ldview ( I also have Bricksmith if that's more useful ) but I can't seem to find where an how I can apply "decals" to my minifig's torso , for example. Do you have any idea as to how it is done ?If it's not too much trouble / too big a process for you , could you please explain :sweet: ? Thank you again for all your help , I did a test render ( without the decals but with everything else in place and pov-render is amazing !

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Hi @Kendo,

I made a patterned torso using TEXMAP so that you have an example... Get it here: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cgi?f=parts/973paz.dat. The texture images must be placed in a "textures" subfolder of your parts folder (where you place the torso itself).

Making your own torsos shouldn't be very difficult using that template. You just need to put your images in the textures folder and modify the image name in the texmap lines.

0 !TEXMAP START PLANAR -18.5 .5 -10 18.5 .5 -10 -18.5 31.5 -10 973paza.png

As for image themselves, they must be PNG images. No need to make them very big (I made them 200 pixels wide wich, considering the size of torso, gives about a 400dpi resolution). Ideally the background (parts of the image that match torso plastic color) should be made transparent to avoid color mismatch.

Have fun!

Edit: Also made legs:

http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cgi?f=parts/3817bpaz.dat

http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cgi?f=parts/3816bpaz.dat

Edited by Philo

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Got it ! I see how it works now . But there isn't a "textures" folder inside my ldraw/parts ( in fact , the only folder there is 's' ) ... I tried creating one and putting the two chima images in there , but that didn't work , and just dumping the images in the ldraw/parts folder didn't do it either. Am I doing something wrong ? Did I misunderstand anything ?

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7 hours ago, Kendo said:

But there isn't a "textures" folder inside my ldraw/parts ( in fact , the only folder there is 's' )

Yes, that's expected. Though the texmap extension was created a few years ago, it was only recently that the parts tracker was updated to allow texmap patterns. The next official release will include the first ones, and the folder will be created. If you download current unofficial parts archive from http://www.ldraw.org/library/tracker/ you will see it too.

7 hours ago, Kendo said:

I tried creating one and putting the two chima images in there

Both Bricksmith and LDView should support texmap, but do you have a recent enough version? Also - I don't know for Bricksmith -, but texmap must be enabled in LDView (edit -> preferences -> primitives tab -> Use texture maps). You could also try LDCad on Linux.

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5 hours ago, Philo said:

Yes, that's expected. Though the texmap extension was created a few years ago, it was only recently that the parts tracker was updated to allow texmap patterns. The next official release will include the first ones, and the folder will be created. If you download current unofficial parts archive from http://www.ldraw.org/library/tracker/ you will see it too.

Both Bricksmith and LDView should support texmap, but do you have a recent enough version? Also - I don't know for Bricksmith -, but texmap must be enabled in LDView (edit -> preferences -> primitives tab -> Use texture maps). You could also try LDCad on Linux.

Does LDCad run on mac?

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I have a new problem with Stud.io. Does anyone know how to fix the 'color 16' issue when importing LDraw models? It seems like Stud.io is randomly choosing when to honor the color, thus leaving a model with half of the parts in the right colors, and the remaining in black.

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1 hour ago, Lasse D said:

I have a new problem with Stud.io. Does anyone know how to fix the 'color 16' issue when importing LDraw models? It seems like Stud.io is randomly choosing when to honor the color, thus leaving a model with half of the parts in the right colors, and the remaining in black.

I haven't seen this issue, but I know that it can happen when undoing a color change. Are you using the import function on the opening "start" menu where the model is directly imported or are you using the File > import method that brings in the file as a submodel?

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2 minutes ago, supertruper1988 said:

I haven't seen this issue, but I know that it can happen when undoing a color change. Are you using the import function on the opening "start" menu where the model is directly imported or are you using the File > import method that brings in the file as a submodel?

Thanks a lot for the tip @supertruper1988 I was always importing as a submodel. By using "open" it loads the model correctly. Now I don't have to spool up my old program for removing color 16 from models (this was needed back in the day when LDraw batch loading had a similar error)

 

Edit

I was too quick with the happiness. The error-free view only lasts until the Render button is pressed :(

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35 minutes ago, Lasse D said:

Thanks a lot for the tip @supertruper1988 I was always importing as a submodel. By using "open" it loads the model correctly. Now I don't have to spool up my old program for removing color 16 from models (this was needed back in the day when LDraw batch loading had a similar error)

 

Edit

I was too quick with the happiness. The error-free view only lasts until the Render button is pressed :(

You can contact BrickLink support on their forums. If you PM I could give it a shot on my machine with the same file. 

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2 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

You can contact BrickLink support on their forums. If you PM I could give it a shot on my machine with the same file. 

Thanks. I ended up firing up the old color propagation app I have to fix the issue. I have uploaded a copy of the file that fails in stud.io here: https://brickhub.org/i/data/265.mpd

The fixed file looks fine now:

264.png

Rendered using the 'Astroid' setup in stud.io.

3D view and instructions here: https://brickhub.org/i/264

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