Strikeman

The http://bluebrick.lswproject.com/ isn't working for me, and I can't seem to find a mirror for the software anywhere :( help ? :)

mimics real life and not using a loop: train turntables! lego examples aplenty Google for more

Thanks guys, I do think I'll enjoy my stay here ! Walter, thank you for the advice, I tried a render with the setting you suggested, I've included it in this. I don't know however, I think the fisheye thingy adds perspective, I quite like it. On a related note, this render has been done with pov-ray 3.7 beta 40, as opposed to my originals which are rendered with pov-ray 3.6. While 3.7 is way faster (cause it's multicore), I can't for the life of me figure out what happened to the colors ... I've compared almost all files in both installation maps but I don't seem to find any difference ... So I really want to use 3.7 but I hate these colors :( Any ideas ?

Hi guys ! I've joined these forums a few days ago to ask some questions and I thought I might as well introduce myself properly here :) I came out of my dark ages a few months ago (having turned 30 this year) and lucky for me, my mother has held on to all my LEGO all these years. Together with some bulk purchases I made last month, I've not got over 250 sets, mostly Town and Technic. I've started work on sorting it all out and in the meantime I've started playing around with MLCAD (I'm in IT and I love computers so I thought why not combine the two :)) Some might've seen me in the Digital Designer subforum already, where I've posted a few pics of a few sets that I've recreated already. Most of my sets are from the period between 1985 and 1995, and it happens to be the best period for LEGO in my opinion :) I've only started working with MLCAD 1 week ago, and I think I've already made a lot of progess in the rendering department (still not 100% but already pretty happy with the skills I have acquired in this short time). I'll share the 5 models I've created in the last week with you guys, tell me what you think about it ! 720-1: BASIC set, gas station. 100% accurate, no vehicles. 7835: Manual Level Crossing, 100% accurate 6384: Police Station, 100% accurate without vehicles, brick seam 1, baseplate is an unoffical part, and the antenna on top is the correct on but the top doesn't show in this image ... 6541: Seaport Harbor, 100% accurate, no vehicles, missing string & hook as I don't know how to do this properly yet :) and the last model I just finished last night, 6389, complete with vehicles, only thing missing is the decal on the 1x4x3 panel on top. I even managed to get the Flexible Hose Generator to work to make the helicopter (was a pain in the megablocks to figure out):

Guys, thanks for the answers already, you are all being very helpful! Sergio, I will check out your software soon (hopefully tonight or tomorrow). I've seen some screenshots of your flex part system, and that looks just awesome, way better than what LSynth or MLCADs Flexible Hose Generator can do. However, I do have to say that I'm growing fond of MLCAD pretty fast. I reserved some time yesterday to fix all the annoyances I had with POV-RAY and that works like a charm now. Still learning about the lightning and camera angles, but it's going better. I also finally took a better look at how to rotate bricks, and I am pretty comfortable with that too now. I've tried LSynth, but that didn't work for the part I wanted to bend. I've started working with MLCADs Flexible Hose Generator and boy that was a pain in the butt until it suddenly hit me how it worked ... I'm now able to use it and have tubes bent the way I want them to bend ! Once the model is complete I'll post it here :) legolijntje, can I add my sets to the official MLCAD models topic aswell ? I'm really having fun with this and I thought of adding a few models to your thread (for starters the 4 in my first post) Also, yojeff, any idea if there is a way to add my MLCAD models to that website ? I've seen that the 4 I've created so far aren't on that website either ... The only problem I have left at the moment is that I'm always loosing track of time while building stuff and I've ended up in bed at 2 o'clock every night for the past week ... :p

Aanchir, thank you for your response. The first one has definately helped me, and your second response made me want to try the Lego designer. So, I downloaded the program, installed it and followed the instructions on this forum to unlock the universe bricks. And then I tried modelling the next set that I was planning, and I pretty quickly was ground to a halt ... (see a bit further as to find out why) The program looks pretty nice but I found it a bit restrictive. It does feel a bit more like playing with real bricks, that's for sure though. The 3 main drawbacks for me to use LDD are probably of no concern to lots of other users, but they are to me: First of, as I've seen mentioned on the forum, there's a serious lack of old bricks. As you've seen from my renders, I have lots of sets I want to digitally build which come from my childhood, meaning sets between 1985 and 1995. There are a lot of bricks that are just not used anymore, and since I really want to draw the things like they are in my booklets, I've got a real problem here. Even using the universe unlocker didn't help with that. Secondly, since this program does not seem to like old bricks, it also doesn't seem to like old building instructions ... :) I've already encountered (in a random vehicle) an illegal connection that LDD just didn't want to make :( And lastly, the lack of old parts apparantly also means the lack of lots baseplates ... that's no good as I also want to use the program to setup a city layout which closely resembles my real life layout, but the program just doens't have the correct baseplates for me :( I am jealous though of the "bending" tool :) I can't for the life of me figure out how to bend something in MLCAD (like for example the hose in the helicopter from set 6389), while it seemed reasonably easy in LDD (haven't tried it full on though). The one thing I couldn't figure out in LDD (neither in MLCAD) is to use the "rope" properly (used in the cars in the set mentioned for example). So again, thanks for the response, and now looking forward to someone who can help me with the other questions about MLCAD :)

Hey guys & gals, I'm fairly new here so I'm probably going to ask a few questions which have already been asked/answered. Sorry for that, I just came out of my dark ages (turned 30 this year, so it took me a while) and I have just recently started working with the digital LEGO software. So far, I've only been using MLCAD and I have a few questions about that. 1. There's a list of official models built with LDD, but I can't find a similar post for MLCAD. Is it not applicable or are the formats interchangeable ? 2. Is there a reason to prefer LDD over MLCAD (or the other way around) ? I find MLCAD to be reasonably enjoyable and I have not tried LDD yet. However, there are 2 drawbacks to MLCAD (only been using it for 3 days so there will probably be more): rendering is a pain due to having to use external programs which half the time totally fubar what I'm trying to achieve (using Win7 64bit probably isn't helping) and rotating parts is a pain in the megablocks. But from what I've read, the (dis)advantage of LDD is that illegal connections will be blocked/deleted on reopening the file ... don't really know if that's such a good idea. 3. Is there an explanation somewhere of how to easily rotate bricks in MLCAD ? 4. Is there some info somewhere on how to properly render (change camera/viewpoint for example). The main problem I have at the moment is that my #include statements always fail (in POV-Ray 3.6), and I have to manually add the path to the LGEO directory to all of them (and yes my environment variables are set) 5. Is there a way to render a specific model in an MLCAD file ? As it is, I'm creating different models all inside 1 MLCAD file (thru multipart -> new model), but I find no way to render them individually ... I need to export them to single ldr files which I can then render ... Thanks in advance for helping me out here, and as a closing statement I'd like to include 4 renders (with my very basic understanding of the rendering process) of the 4 official sets that I've recreated yesterday in MLCAD. Enjoy :) 6384 - Police station (no decals on baseplate, otherwise 100% accurate) 6541 - International Seaport (only thing that's not ok are the crane booms (see question 3) 7835 - Manual Road Crossing (adapted to a 7-stud baseplate because I wanted it that way, also no decals on the train crossing gate) and lastly, the gaspump from basic set 720 (I wanted to render from another angle but didn't figure this out yet, see question 4) Cheers, Andy