hrontos

Thank you. Expensive in the sense of the required time to render. The water took longer to render than the model itself. I will look for the POV code and share it. Here is a nice POV-Ray water tutorial I learned from.

Good point. I would also suggest to gain experience by studying and building creations made by more experienced builders. For technic models with gears bracing of gears is the most important to avoid gear skipping. In case of your design, this means, to avoid using just plain 4L black half beams on a 2L axle. Their will slip of the 2L axle when torque is transfered. EDIT: in this topic Sicil presented a very nice small RC car.

Thank you for trying. It looks like forum removed some special combinations of characters so the code did not make sense. Once again: plane { y, min_extent(ldd_model).y texture { average texture_map { #declare Ind = 0; #declare S = seed(0); #while(Ind < 40) // higher number of iterations=less artifacts [1 pigment { ldd_colors[1] } finish { ambient 0 #if (version>=3.7) emission 0 #end diffuse 0.2 brilliance 1 phong 0.0 phong_size 20 specular 0.0 roughness 1 reflection { 1 } conserve_energy } normal { bumps 0.05 // smaller value = less blured reflection translate < rand(S), rand(S), rand(S) >*100 scale 0.001 // scale it small(0.001) or big(1000) } ] #declare Ind = Ind+1; #end } } no_reflection }

Nice and simple water. I made several attempts with a water, but it was quite expensive to render:

In that post a HDR image was used. And a simple reflective floor without texture. In this post I showed how to easily add custom reusable floor to LDD2POVray. You can make it more reflective. I can post some examples with more reflective floor. But HDR images you will have to create or download from available free source.

1) Yes, of course it depends on what you see in your view. Portions of the scene which are out of view are not rendered and do not affect rendering time. Or to be more precise: they are rendered only as reflections (on reflective surface visible in the view) and when there are some reflections, they do affect rendering time. 2) If you cut it, you will not see shadows and reflections comming from these objects. But when the do not appear in reflections, they do not influence rendering time. When you have one large object in the front and thousand objects behind it and those thousand objects do not cast shadows visible in the view nor reflect on some surface visible in the view, they do not have any serious impact on the rendering time. They just consume memory. This behaviour is due to fact, that POV-Ray uses bounding box for each object and when ray being traced do not hit that bounding box, object is ignored. This bounding box checking is done for each ray and each object, but is it considered as cheap operation comparing to tracing itself. 3) Until now there is no good tip how to speed-up rendering of transparent parts. In LDD2POVray, bevels slow down rendering a lot, so avoiding bevels on trans parts helps a lot. It also helps to use smaller parts. For example, when you have one 8x8 transparent plate, consider replacing it with 64 1x1 transparent plates. This is again due to bounding boxes - larger parts are hit more often and since large plate is more complex than small one, after bounding box is hit, it is being traced. With smaller parts, smaller parts are hit and traced.

This is a nice combination of rendering and outlines. This quality of images I have seen many times in custom BI. Usually, when using outlines, it is enough to use lowest quality (on the last tab) and you will get flat colored image (just suitable for BI). Of course, to use raytracer for such flat images is a bit strange. Yes, outlines replace bevels and therefore rendering is much faster (beveling requires a difference operation, which is slow).

Do you have also some results with some simplier shapes like plates or panels? May be it works also with them and they will be easier to mirror than the blades. I presume it can be very complicated to mirror those blades since the rotors have provide equal lift force and at the same time also equal torque so that they really compensate each other.

It's very interesting to watch the battle. Looks like 2 fan clubs. I like how rm8 with his Boss really kept in mind, that it should be able to crawl and tried to get out of this high chassis as much as possible.

Yes, the digital entries may suffer many these COG issue. As efferman tested with his offroad delivery service, high and heavy entries may lean. Many people probably like the part selection and overall design and do not bother that much with these issues. Or TLG will resolve it. Quad bike is probably the only that has COG lower than the Boss, since it is more flat.

A very nice one. Thank you a lot for your support. It makes me feel proud that so many digital entries were chosen for the finals and used LDD2POVRay to get better looking images. This is the first contest where digital and real entries can compete as equals. It is no longer important how big brick collections people have, anybody can participate, creativity is the only fact that matters.

I wonder, if all the models from the top 10 are expected to be sold for the same price. The entries have different part counts (some of them significantly) and also some other features (motors, lights etc...) which influence the price and make them without the price info a bit incomparable. Do we have some info on that? BTW: did you noticed how TLG nicely randomly shuffles the images on official voting site, probably to avoid any "preffered" or otherwise forced entries? If it was intended, it is really nice detail.

EDIT: moved to the new discussion topic as DLuders requested.

Thank you Markus, without that the only alternative is probably eBay.

:laugh: So now we know a studless LEGO can fly. What about studded versíon?

I have seen this in designer's blog. It was a big surprise to me, since 100 times 200USD (or even 100USD, since production costs are lower than the retail price) is still 10 000 - 20 000 USD which I consider a very high investment from the TLG side into competition and a if it is true very nice present to the community. LEGOshop does not ship to my country and since this one will be available only online, there will be no chance to get it in my country directly.

No, they not. 8043 gearbox is more complex. 8294 and 42006 appear to be more similar.

Also small RC models behave sometimes like that when there are some things around them - air flow is very crazy when there many things around. May be some verticaly mounted panel or plate will make it more stable, since the air flow will try to keep it in vertical position.

They were not mentioned for a while and there some updates since they were last mentioned, but there are still missing pneumatic parts in the LDD. Since they are appearing in recent sets, may be they can be added also to LDD. Flexing pneumatic tubes have quite simple geometry, so they should not be a problem and the other parts are not more complicated than linear actuators or other PF parts. And the new PF motors would be nice, but not a must have.

The PF remote seems to be easier to rebuild using beams/pins into custom stick or wheel based controls. This one has 4 buttons, no direct posibility to attach a pin or axle to buttons, so custom remote will have to rely only on pushing, no direct connection.

Really nice rendered models.

This comparison to standard PF sets is not very good. The inteligent brick is much more complex device. I would compare it more to a simple smartphone and in that case, the brick itself is may be worth 80-150USD. Each sensor is another 20-30USD. And also motors. In standard sets there are many pieces, but they are really cheap - so you pay 10USD for 300 pins.

That is huge. With a lot of possibilities to add details at that scale. Once finished it will be another masterpiece for a long term display to public just like your DAF truck. Looking forward to see it grow.

idkwhoyouare's black offroader with black brush guard made it to Top 10

According to TechnicBricks 350USD. 594 pieces.