Kendo

Hey guys ! Posted my last-minute entry yesterday night, here's a photo and link !

Hey everyone ! It's been ages since I took part in a Eurobricks contest of any kind, but when I stumbled upon the Concept Art Contest this Friday, I knew I had to cook something up, no matter how little time remained, since I am a huge fan of Ralph McQuarrie's art. About half of the wall space of my house is filled with framed posters of his drawings, as I am simply in love with his ability to capture the feeling of each location - you can almost feel how it would be like if you were there. My favorite work of his is all the ROTJ imperial imagery, like the super industrial proto-Coruscant that Vader escorts Luke through to get to the Emperor, but Palpy's throne room itself takes the cake in my opinion. The final movie version of the room onboard the DSII is iconic to be sure, but to me this version of it is an amazing, super Star-Wars-y location, and perfectly matches the Emperor's character and the tone of the sequence. My build is quite simple, as the platform and throne are quite simple, sharp and bold shapes themselves. For the lava, I wanted something a tad more realistic and interesting than trans-orange tiles on a baseplate, so I employed the classic idea of a net piece sandwiched between 1x1 plates and 1x1 tiles on the bottom and top respectively, which gives the ability to curve and shape your surface, and created a subtle wave pattern. Due to my time limitations, I switched the camera's angle to be higher up to avoid building tons of rockwork on the back, but I included the small parts near the platform using the new-ish beehive part,BB-8 heads and barraki eyes, so you can get an idea of what the rest of it would look like. So, here goes, please tell me your thoughts and critiques !

Hi @Philo , - If you mean the image I posted above , it's just a screenshot (aka printscreen) from my .ldr file opened with LDView. So the TEXMAP stuff shows up just fine in LDView, but not at all in Pov-Ray. - The way I go from the aforementioned .ldr file to the scene I give to Pov-Ray is the most basic one : I use file > export in LDView. Is this a mistake ? Is there a correct way of doing this ? Oh ok so it seems that "TEXMAP FALLBACK" isn't what I thought it was, I think I'll use the same technique you used to do the head for the curved part of the legs. My only real problem is the rendering issue . Do you want me to DM you my files ? Would that help ?

Hello @Philo and rest of the gang , after another small period of absence due to work , I have been able to work on my project for the past 4-5 days. Since Philo gave me all the essential tools I went ahead and created .dat's with TEXMAP decals for the waist of a minifigure , as well as for both upper parts of the dual moulded legs previously discussed . I would be really happy to give back for all your help Philo, so if these are useful to you or anyone else , It would be my pleasure to DM the files to you so that you could add them to the database ( although I haven't , as you see below , quite nailed the legs - is it something to do with "TEXMAP FALLBACK" ? ). So my new main character and sigfig is ready , for anyone interested , here's a very rough , non rendered , literally-just-an-ldraw-screenshot look : My last problem however , is the aforementioned rendering ! When I convert the file you see in the above screenshot to .pov and run Pov_Ray with said .pov as a source scene , many errors pop up , and I can't render it ( I can post the exact errors if that would help ) . Weirdly it happens with every TEXMAP'ed part I use except from the torso, but even if I give a source scene with a blank minifig with only the aforementioned torso , the render does not have the "decal" on the torso , it's just a plain brown torso. What am I doing wrong ? Is there a setting or a library I have to include to enable the TEXMAP textures to show up ?If not , is there any other solution in order to have the decals show up on my Pov-Ray render ? Thanks in advance for any help and I hope the couple of parts i created can be a useful brick in the amazingly rich wall that is the ldraw library

Well first of all , totally unrelated but that's a pretty cool CityEl @Lasse D !. On a more relevant note, thanks to all of you guys I made it. I was so busy trying to make it work on Bricksmith that I didn't try opening it with LDView. The decals show up just fine there. Fun fact though : They also showed up in Bricksmith when I accidentally zoomed waaaay close to the torso ( 1/4th-of-the-torso-was-covering-my-whole-screen kinds of close ). My first assumption is that the .png I used could be too large, and maybe Bricksmith has a limit, which I overshot, until I zoomed and cut out 3/4ths of the image. Will investigate this further when I have the time and let you guys know of my findings. Are there any already available texmap patterned parts for a minifig head, minifig hip piece, and the upper part of the dual moulded legs ( 20460 and 20461)similar to the torso and legs you linked above @Philo? I could try to make them from scratch but it would be silly to do so before checking if someone's already made them (although I doubt I'll manage to make them if no one has ). By the way, some first renders I'm trying out look amazing, and it's all thanks to you my friend, I can't thank you enough, but I can, and will, give you all the props and credit in the world when I post the builds and story I'm using these for

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 ?

Hello @Philo, and sorry for the late reply, the last couple of weeks were full or work , no time for building / rendering . 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 ? 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 !

@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 !

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 ?

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 ?

Damn , Windows only ( I use Mac and Linux ). 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 !

Thanks so much for the help , all 3 of you . @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

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.

Man that looks amazing ! PM'ed you with details so we can get this going . Finding such a good designer is a great Christmas gift !

Thank you so much @DefinitelyJY ! Well, the first figure I need is my main character , who wears this guy's clothes ( I need decals for torso front, back and legs ) and has the new Captain America head ( the serious expression, not the smiling one , so need a face decal for that as well ). Is there any website / flickr page / whatever where I can see your style / past creations ? Again , thanks a ton in advance !