[Software] LDD2PovRay

[hrontos]

1366x768, 1803x1014, 2732x1536

The skating rink took extremly long time when built using two transparent 8x8 plates. I had to replace them by 1x1 plates.

The original LXF model was built by yellost and published in this post. I made only small modifications.

[Superkalle]

It looks amazing

The lighting is good. And the colors are coming out really good now I think. The Reddish brown is possibly coming out a little bit too strong and might need some adjustments in the future.

What still gives it away as a render is the whites (for example the 6x10 plate with the bench/cat). The shadows makes the white look a bit "dirty". In the other colors, the dark shadows gets camouflaged better, but for white there is something unnatural. Real LEGO white is a tad more transparent and has a more "milky" white color (don't know how to explain it). Maybe the white color needs a bit more yellow in it to compensate? Or maybe the material can be just a tiny bit translucent?

EDIT:

Come to think of it, the color of the entire scene look a tiny bit too saturated, like a Photoshoped product photography. Is the image straight out of POVRAY or have you enhanced it?

[Superkalle]

Here is the same picture, but with a tad less saturation. It's just a tiny amount, but may give the effect that the photo was taken "at home". (not sure though, just thinking out aloud).

winter_village_2732x1536_mod.zip

[hrontos]

What still gives it away as a render is the whites (for example the 6x10 plate with the bench/cat). The shadows makes the white look a bit "dirty". In the other colors, the dark shadows gets camouflaged better, but for white there is something unnatural. Real LEGO white is a tad more transparent and has a more "milky" white color (don't know how to explain it). Maybe the white color needs a bit more yellow in it to compensate? Or maybe the material can be just a tiny bit translucent?

I think it looks dusty/dirty because of the white background. Our brain knows that bricks should be white and also knows that background is white. Since the bricks has also some shadows they look dirty. I agree, that they may be need some yellowish tint to avoid that direct comparison with background. Making the material translucent is also possible, but it would increase the rendering time (and I would say dramatically for larger bricks).

This image contains colors slightly shifted towards yellow in image editor. Colors looks may be even bit more appealing. I think, that the same effect can be obtained by using more yellowish light since it is almost impossible to have pure white light in real life (temperature of such light source would be extremly high).

Come to think of it, the color of the entire scene look a tiny bit too saturated, like a Photoshoped product photography. Is the image straight out of POVRAY or have you enhanced it?

No, those images are direct output from POV-Ray, using just default (initial) settings. I think, the colors looks so good because there are many colors and human eye has less chance to see imperfections.

[Tore M]

Wow, just wow!

I've been offline during the summer and just recently discovered this wonderful piece of software. Great documentation as well, to get the users started. Thank you hrontos and Superkalle!

Off-topic: It's been almost 20 years since I last played with POV-Ray, at that time emulating a math coprocessor on my 486SX 20MHz. I remember a 800x600 render which took more than 14 days of rendering time to complete...

[hrontos]

Off-topic: It's been almost 20 years since I last played with POV-Ray, at that time emulating a math coprocessor on my 486SX 20MHz. I remember a 800x600 render which took more than 14 days of rendering time to complete...

Wow, I knew, that POV-Ray has long history and tradition but I did not expected to meet here anybody who remembers those early POV-Ray times.

I hope, you will enjoy also the converter and I am pretty sure, that it is still possible to have some render taking 14 days also today even on i3@2.4GHz.

I will be happy, if you share your experience and any comments with us.

Edited August 3, 2012 by hrontos

[Phoxtane]

I've run into an issue that I can't tell if it's related to POV-Ray or the converter... When the rendering process starts, the status bars says that it's running ~1500 pixels per second [PPS]. After about an hour, that number has dropped to 30ish PPS and continues to drop. It really will take a while, and I was wondering if there was a way to make it go any faster?

[hrontos]

I've run into an issue that I can't tell if it's related to POV-Ray or the converter... When the rendering process starts, the status bars says that it's running ~1500 pixels per second [PPS]. After about an hour, that number has dropped to 30ish PPS and continues to drop. It really will take a while, and I was wondering if there was a way to make it go any faster?

Rendering speed depends on the structure of the POV-Ray scene, used materials, number and types of the lights sources, antialiasing etc. There is no way to speed up the same scene, you have to change some parameters.

Good starting point is to turn off antialiasing and render at higher resolution. Multiply width and height by at least 2 - there will be 4 times more pixels to render, but it is faster that POV-Ray's default antialiasing.

You can reduce number of light sources or make them shadowless.

Transparent parts are slow to render. Smaller transparent parts render faster, so if it is possible replace larger transparent brick by some smaller bricks (for example replace 8x8 plate by 64 1x1 plates - depending on the point of view, there is high probability, that it will not be visible on the output image).

More advanced users can make materials (bricks) less reflective since less reflective materials render faster.

Render can take anything from few minutes to few days. In the second case I recommend to use the Pause in POV-Ray and Hibernate in Windows to give your computer some time to rest (it is also safer to hibernate the computer when you are leaving home).

It is possible to split render to more partial renders by specifying desired starting and ending pixel colum and row. This is usefull to prevent loss of work when render is aborted due to any reason. And also when you need to rerender a portion of an image

POV-Ray has also Continue_Trace ini option. When Continue_Trace=On is added to the ini file, POV-Ray will continue aborted render. Useful to prevent going mad when a few days trace is aborted after 90%.

[drdavewatford]

What an amazing piece of sofware - superb !

So I installed it on my Mac but it kept crashing. And then I saw the disclaimer on the website about waiting for version 3.7 because 3.6 doesn't work on newer Macs. Doh !

So please hurry up with version 3.7 already - I can't wait to try this !

D.

[King of Nynrah]

All seems to be working well with the exception of an error I get, shown in my screenshot here. How do I fix it?

[hrontos]

What an amazing piece of sofware - superb !

So I installed it on my Mac but it kept crashing. And then I saw the disclaimer on the website about waiting for version 3.7 because 3.6 doesn't work on newer Macs. Doh !

So please hurry up with version 3.7 already - I can't wait to try this !

D.

I am sorry I will disappoint you, but I cannot tell you if the LDD to POV-Ray Converter can work on any windows "emulator" on Mac. It needs windows, .NET framework and it creates a virtual disk. I tested it also on virtual machine created using VMware and it works without problems but I have no idea if it is possible to run it on Mac using similar approach.

All seems to be working well with the exception of an error I get, shown in my screenshot here. How do I fix it?

Could you, please, share with us content of your Messages tab from POV-Ray? There are several post in this thread having similar problems and it was either some directory setup problem or incorrect version of POV-Ray - it has to be 3.7 from POV-Ray's beta page.

[Teazza]

Hi, I'm trying to run the program but I don't have the db.lif file in LDD, I have to create it?

I get the message "unable to generate necessary includes"

What I've to do?

Please help me. Thanks

[hrontos]

Hi, I'm trying to run the program but I don't have the db.lif file in LDD, I have to create it?

I get the message "unable to generate necessary includes"

What I've to do?

Please help me. Thanks

LDD creates that file automatically when running LDD for a first time. LDD to POV-Ray initially offers a path that should correctly correspond to your db.lif location. This file is by default located in AppData subdirectory of your windows profile directory. You can get there by opening Windows Explorer and putting there %appdata% as a folder name. It will automatically open the correct folder. There should LEGO Company subfolder and in that the LEGO Digital Designer folder.

[Teazza]

LDD creates that file automatically when running LDD for a first time. LDD to POV-Ray initially offers a path that should correctly correspond to your db.lif location. This file is by default located in AppData subdirectory of your windows profile directory. You can get there by opening Windows Explorer and putting there %appdata% as a folder name. It will automatically open the correct folder. There should LEGO Company subfolder and in that the LEGO Digital Designer folder.

WOW! it works! many thanks.

I just tried some renders, it looks a little bit slow, but I've to adjust settings.

Anyhow the renderds looks amazing!

Many thanks for your help!

Bye

[-GZ-]

Gallery examples look wonderful, but I can't believe...

I was trying to make a photorealistic picture of some sample LDD MOCs and figs, but they are quite ugly, with black dots near parts edges. They look realistic if they are small, but larger ones are totally spoiled. What's the matter? I haven't changed anything in the settings. I've only opened my files in POV-Ray myself, because it does not open automatically after conventing!

I tried to set highest level of detail, but nothing has changed.

An example of my old MOC rendered:

What should I do to get a photorealistic image?

Edited August 5, 2012 by -GZ-

[idunno101]

this thing looks sick can't wait to use it when I get back from vacation should be fun what some of my model look like in this

[Superkalle]

this thing looks sick can't wait to use it when I get back from vacation should be fun what some of my model look like in this

This is a forum for adults. We require you to start sentences with a capital letter and to use proper punctuation.

[hrontos]

Gallery examples look wonderful, but I can't believe...

I was trying to make a photorealistic picture of some sample LDD MOCs and figs, but they are quite ugly, with black dots near parts edges. They look realistic if they are small, but larger ones are totally spoiled. What's the matter? I haven't changed anything in the settings. I've only opened my files in POV-Ray myself, because it does not open automatically after conventing!

I tried to set highest level of detail, but nothing has changed.

An example of my old MOC rendered:

What should I do to get a photorealistic image?

These random black pixels are a result from max_trace_level reached. When POV-Ray traces a ray it follows it respecting all reflections. Whenever a surface is reached and ray is reflected, it is followed. Number of such hops is specified by max_trace_level. When this number of such "hops" is reached before reaching light source, entire pixel will be black.

To resolve this, increase a max_trace_level in the generated POV file - it contains value 50, max. is 255. Or render at higher resolution without antialiasing and resize down the rendered image. Rendering resolution without antialiasing should be at least double of the desired final resolution to able to resize down to 50%. I resize down to 25% or 33%.

[Marc Muller]

Hello everybody

I tried LDD2PovRay a few days ago, but could not get anything except errors....today, i uninstalled everything, and reinstalled it...and now it works

Here is a preview of a fire truck i converted in different colours from a LDD file from mocpages.com

comments welcome

(ps. i do know that i choosed the wrong legs for the minifigs, they received real legs already)

thanks a lot

Marc

Image

I put my picture back on, as it is only 512 pixels wide, so i don t know why it was deleted as being oversized???

Your image was not deleted, but converted in text link.

The size is 2560 x 1440, far bigger than allowed in this forum.

Please, next time you think the intervention of a moderator/regulator is not correct, contact him instead than cancel his correction.

Calabar

Edited August 7, 2012 by Calabar
Oversized image converted in text link (maximum size allowed is 800x600)

[hrontos]

Hello everybody

I tried LDD2PovRay a few days ago, but could not get anything except errors....today, i uninstalled everything, and reinstalled it...and now it works

Here is a preview of a fire truck i converted in different colours from a LDD file from mocpages.com

comments welcome

(ps. i do know that i choosed the wrong legs for the minifigs, they received real legs already)

thanks a lot

Marc

Hello Marc,

welcome to the forum. I am glad you finally managed to install it and it works for you.

Nice first render. Converter respects the model view you selected in and saved in LDD, so you can zoom your models as you need to fill whole image to avoid too much unused white area. Sometimes it is necessary to move and return back some brick to make LDD think that save is necessary and it will enable the Save button and you can save the camera view point. Because normaly change of camera view point is not considered by LDD as change and it will not save the model. Or you can crop it later in picture editor.

Edited August 5, 2012 by hrontos

[Classicsmiley]

Thank you very, very much for this tool! I'm having a lot of fun playing around with the different settings.

I've had several successful renders, but when I just tried to enable the "Color Outlines" I got the following errors:

A popup (titled File: 'ldd_colors.bin') with the message "Failed to open file: Access is denied".

The actual POV error message is "\\.\LDDIncludes\ldd_colors.bin" line 89: Parse Error: Expected 'numeric expression', undeclared identifier 'ldd_color_1' found instead.

Has anyone else run into this problem? I'm on Win7 x64, with 64-bit versions of POV Ray 3.7 RC6 and LDD to POV-Ray Converter.

[Artizan]

not realistic enough.

[hrontos]

Thank you very, very much for this tool! I'm having a lot of fun playing around with the different settings.

I've had several successful renders, but when I just tried to enable the "Color Outlines" I got the following errors:

A popup (titled File: 'ldd_colors.bin') with the message "Failed to open file: Access is denied".

The actual POV error message is "\\.\LDDIncludes\ldd_colors.bin" line 89: Parse Error: Expected 'numeric expression', undeclared identifier 'ldd_color_1' found instead.

Has anyone else run into this problem? I'm on Win7 x64, with 64-bit versions of POV Ray 3.7 RC6 and LDD to POV-Ray Converter.

Thank you for finding this error, I will check it.

[King of Nynrah]

Could you, please, share with us content of your Messages tab from POV-Ray? There are several post in this thread having similar problems and it was either some directory setup problem or incorrect version of POV-Ray - it has to be 3.7 from POV-Ray's beta page.

Here you go.

[hrontos]

Here you go.

According to you taskbar icons, LDD2POVRay is not running. It must be running while POV-Ray is parsing the scene.