hrontos

The only way I found in this new version is to create a group out of the parts that should be recolored. After that apply the paint bucket tool directly to the newly created group in the group palette.

As Aanchir said: to make decoration accessible directly in LDD GUI, it is necessary to specify which decorations are allowed for given decoration surface on a given brick. This is done by the LDD Team. When this mapping is not done, decoration list will not appear for that brick in LDD. But brick still can display decorations, but they have to be added manually by editing LXF file. That's what Aanchir did for us.

LDD Manager will help you a lot if you plan to get the parts from the BrickLink. If you just want to handpick your parts from your own boxes, this excel BOM is good enough.

Current version of the LDD (4.3.5) has a new function - Export of BOM (bill of materials) to Excel. It is as a menu item in the File menu.

I agree. I have also UAC enabled and POV-Ray 3.7 works without any problems. Rendering software is not good enough reason to turn off UAC.

Yes they are there. 330 is in the second row, second column, 329 is third row, fifth column in Extended mode color palette.

The one with teeth can interlock with this one or this one in real life. However, they does not seem to exist in the LDD and are not being used in recent sets.

Yes, I use that resolution on the notebook, the palette does not fully fit on screen, bottom of the palette is outside screen boundaries.

In LDD Extended mode view you should see palette containing all bricks (all of them are usually in a red color, you can color them later). This represents all available bricks. Bricks not present in this palette are not available in LDD yet. Do you miss some particular brick? You can add it at least to the wish list topic, so that it will be taken into consideration during next update.

Yes, for the user the part is removed from the original LXF. At the same moment this file is created with good bricks in yellow and problematic in red. This file should some help to find which brick was removed from problematic model. But this file cannot be opened directly, since the red bricks are still considered being problematic and will be removed so user will not see them.

Did you switched to LDD Extended view? LDD supports basic LDD view, Mindstorms view a LDD Extended view with all 2500+ parts available.

Just guessing, since you did not posted any picture with your model. Rotation usually does not work, when there is more than one pivot. Even when it looks like all pivots are on the same axis, LDD will not let you rotate. Differential housing with all gears inside is also an example of structure having two pivots (each axle is one pivot). You have remove one of them to be able to rotate whole housing.

This is a standard behaviour. When model is opened and some brick cannot be loaded/placed, this file is created. All bricks are in yellow, problematic bricks are in red color. You can open the file in some text editor and examine it.

What exactly is not working? After clicking Yes to start render immediately in LDD2POVray the POV-Ray will not start? Or you really manualy start POV-Ray and manually open ini file and click on the Run/Render button in toolbar the rendering will not start. Did you get some error message? The path to directory where db.lif is stored is prefilled automatically and it is very unlikely that you have to change it. The output path for the includes can by any directory. I personally have it as a subdirectory named LDDinc in the folder where db.lif is located. Do not specify the same directory as you plan for your models, since it will not work. LDD2POVray will create a few houndred files (more than 500) and they can have up to 1GB so select some location with enough space where that large number of files will not bother you. You will not need to work with these files directly so it really does not matter where they are. As I said, I have in a subfolder stored n together with db.lif. POVRAY.INI can be opened using Tools menu in POV-Ray. Add following line there: Library_Path=\\.\LDDIncludes

Yes, the folder is accessible now. Brickshelf is moderated. This means, that each folder is by default private only to owner. After moderators review the content, it is made public. This applies also to changes in the folder. Whenever folder content is changed, it is made private again and waits for moderators to get back public access.

Originally I thought only about those small thumbnail size images of bricks in the palette. So when the user expands some brick category, only 2D images are loaded. When he does not attempts to use given brick or rotate it in palette, 3D data will not be loaded. On the other hand, it is quite tricky, to have 2D images of bricks in so many colors and switch from 2D to 3D will be probably noticeable since visual appearance (mainly shading) of a brick would change. As it was mentioned many times, multithreading and usage of more processor cores LDD could possibly help also with this.

Aanchir, you have my respect and admiration. It's really impressive to read some of your comments. Just like when a man shows an ant or fly to biologist and he will tell him everything about that particular kind of an ant. We all have it like a hobby, but it looks like you have it as a hobby on a completely different level. Or did you graduated on LEGO? I have been already impressed by the work Superkalle invested into the LDD Manager to build such database and now when I read some of these comments, I am impressed again.

Yes. And among other also the bug I reported here was corrected.

May be a compromise will perform the best: use 2D thumbnails and load 3D data only when user attempts to rotate the brick.

Yes, just add: Continue_Trace=On to the ini file or +c to the command line box (this is usefull, when rendering directly pov file without ini file).

This part number to design ID "conversion" can be done using LEGO website. The missing parts service lets you specify part number and shows you design ID and color. It's a pitty LDD not longer contains that useless web browser pane - it could be used to display the missing parts service information directly in LDD so search would be without switching to browser application. The part numbers are visible in only LDD mode. LDD palette contains for each design/color combination also the part number. In extended mode part numbers can be also added, but such database would be quite big, since each design ID in different colors has different part number. LDD does not contain all these combinations. Of course, it would be great to have it there. I am not sure they will add that database to LDD. It can be built manually, but it is a huge job. I am not sure if LDD Manager has also LEGO part numbers or only BrickLink part numbers.

Nice render and a nice model. Logo on the studs would make it a bit slowlier, but bevels are the part making it slow, so logos increase memory requirements, but rendering time should not be significantly longer. Concerning the part you forgot: it is possible to render only a portion of image. Just add to the generated ini file following lines: Start_Row=2552 Start_Column=4296 End_Row=1936 End_Column=5130 Numbers are in pixels are just an examples. Open you image in picture editor, use some selection tool to draw a rectangle around the portion of the model where the missing part belongs. And take top left coordinates as start and bottom right coordinates as end. Run the render. Only that area will be rendered. Then copy/paste the rendered rectangle into original image.

Concerning tooltips: simply enable them in your Preferences in the Edit menu. Concerning the duplicates: they are duplicate only in LDD. Their real appearance or physical properties (like clutch power) are different, so why to treat them as same? When you are searching, because you are building according to building instructions it will find you the right brick when you type the correct design ID into search box. And correct design ID can be found using LEGO website.

Thank you, it was bit on the fly, so I hope, I did not introduced some new errors. Thank you bbqqq, I hope the requested checkbox works as you expected and reduces rendering time to values comparable with your tests.

Probably LDD Manager is the only current solution. It is easy to create lxfml file, but problem is the part number mapping between Bricklink/Peeron and LDD. And LDD Manager is the only tool that has the necessary data.