Extract LDD geometries with 3D Screenprint

[Superkalle]

A friend at work showed me this the other day. It's a freeware software from Dassault Systems that is part of the 3DVia product suite. It basically allows you to extract the OpenGL/DirectX data from your graphics card. So naturally I had to give it a go in LDD with one of my MOCs. As output you get 3D XML files that can be viewed in the freeware viewer (also from Dassault). Now, if these files can be converted to any other format, or if they can be used various post-processing I don't know, but its pretty cool you can get 3D models from any application that easy.

Read more here

Download software (and the 3D XML viewer) here

[Lalror]

This looks great!!! I will use this after modeling in LDD to export my MOC's to Blender for better rendering!

[SpiderSpaceman]

That is way too cool. just wish one could move them into solidworks or inventor.

[Superkalle]

That is way too cool. just wish one could move them into solidworks or inventor.

Apperantly you can move the generated 3DXML files directly into CATIA if that's of any value. For other software I don't know, I guess it's a matter of converting the 3D XML format. It'd be really cool if one could make some nice ray-tracing images from these files. The only problem is off couse that the LDD geometries does not have any beveled edges on the bricks, so I'm not sure how good it would look.

[Philo]

Extremely interesting! could be a solution to get 3D parts meshes in LDraw...

[Philo]

Now, if these files can be converted to any other format

Here lies the problem. Looks like there is no cheap converter for 3DXML format. I guess it would be possible to write one since the file format seems documented, but...

[Lalror]

*Screams at Lego* "We want more export options!"

[Philo]

I went on this method to get LDraw parts from LDD. I posted a sketch of the process on good old Lugnet. Here is a LDraw part obtained this way.

[pbk420]

Very cool since i use both Ldraw and LDD will be nice to see some more parts added to Ldraw that LDD has and Ldraw doesnt.

[Bojan Pavsic]

The meshes for all parts in LDD are in db.lif. They're written as a list of vertices and normals. There's a list of indices to create triangles. Some meshes have texture coordinates too. I did get the data out of the 3.x database, didn't really check the 4.x database (but it has some additional info about edges and shading).