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Up to the arrival of Studio 2, I used POV as exported by LDCad. I have now switched to the photorealistic renderer of Studio. It can be a bit tricky to convince Studio to properly display new LDraw unofficial parts or flexible stuff, but it can be done and the result is very nice. See examples below...

 

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I like to use the LDraw import in Mecabricks and then using the Mecabricks render-farm. The downside though, is that not all LDraw parts are available in Mecabricks (yet) and that LDcad flexible parts can't be imported either.

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As far as I know, these are all the render engines that have been used for rendering Lego:

  • POV-Ray
  • Bluerender (which actually uses the SunFlow render engine)
  • Blender's Cycles
  • Blender's EEVEE
  • Stud.io's EyeSight (which uses a version of Cycles)
  • LDView and LGLite (which are mostly only used for rendering instructions)

I personally have used POV-Ray and Stud.io, but I've recently started to move towards using Cycles, due to how photorealistic it's renders can be:

800x450.jpg

Edited by mocbuild101

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On 1/17/2019 at 11:44 PM, Philo said:

Up to the arrival of Studio 2, I used POV as exported by LDCad. I have now switched to the photorealistic renderer of Studio. It can be a bit tricky to convince Studio to properly display new LDraw unofficial parts or flexible stuff, but it can be done and the result is very nice. See examples below...

 

Thank you very much guys.  Studio is working quite nicely.

Do you know how to convince it to render unofficial LDraw parts?

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Basically the process is to place the needed unofficial parts (and all their unofficial dependancies!) in Studio custom parts folder.

- The detailed, "chirurgical" way.

Lets say that I want to import the following LDraw file:

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Philo/studiotest/un0.jpg

If I open this file in Studio, I get all unknown parts:

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Philo/studiotest/un1.jpg

Open a file explorer (I'm talking of Windows, dunno details for OSx) and go to C:\Users\(your user name)\AppData\Local\Stud.io. Create there a CustomParts folder, and in this folder create a parts folder ...AppData\Local\Stud.io\CustomParts\parts). Go to LDraw parts tracker, get the LDraw files for these parts (973p9b.dat, 39613.dat and 35442.dat) and place them in this folder. Restart Studio, reload file.

Getting better...

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Philo/studiotest/un2.jpg

The torso and heart are now there, but the plate gear looks weird... Indeed, this parts relies on many subparts (35442s01.dat, 35442s02.dat and 35442s03.dat) that are still unknown from Studio ! Create a "s" folder in parts folder (...AppData\Local\Stud.io\CustomParts\parts\s), get the subparts from parts tracker and place them in this newly created folder.

Better? No...

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Philo/studiotest/un3.jpg

That's because the subpart also depends on other unofficial files, scaled primitives this time (3-16con5.dat and 1-16ring9.dat)
These are to be placed in a "p" folder, subfolder of CustomParts (...AppData\Local\Stud.io\CustomParts\p). Once this is done, it works...
http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Philo/studiotest/un4.jpg

A bit complicated... fortunately, there is...

- the brute force method

Instead of placing files one by one in their proper folder, download ALL latest LDraw unofficial parts (direct link: http://www.ldraw.org/library/unofficial/ldrawunf.zip). Open this zip and place its contents in ...AppData\Local\Stud.io\CustomParts and you are done!

Well... almost. As Studio doesn't contain the latest official LDraw library, some of the unofficial parts may use recent official subparts or primitives unknown from Studio. So if you still see "?" boxes you need to use the "chirurgical" method above...

As I said it's not for the fainthearted ;) And I have not addressed another big issue: some Studio part are NOT compatible with LDraw parts (different origin, orientation, etc...).

On 1/19/2019 at 9:42 AM, mocbuild101 said:

I personally have used POV-Ray and Stud.io, but I've recently started to move towards using Cycles, due to how photorealistic it's renders can be:

Is there a detailed tutorial for using Cycles? While I like Studio renders, it can be pretty tricky, as detailed above...

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10 hours ago, Philo said:

Is there a detailed tutorial for using Cycles?

Not really, there are tutorials, but none of them cover all the steps required to make a render like the one I posted above.

I'm actually planing on making my own tutorial/guide, similar to the one made for POV-Ray, on how to make the exact render I posted above.

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15 hours ago, Philo said:

Basically the process is to place the needed unofficial parts (and all their unofficial dependancies!) in Studio custom parts folder.

- The detailed, "chirurgical" way.

 

This is perfect.  It works the same way to add individual custom parts to the LDraw filing.  I didn't realize it would be "as easy" with Studio.  Thank you, sir.

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