conchology

Thank you for the update Brickdoctor. I've been playing the whole weekend in a windows virtual machine to get to nowhere with it :-( Here are my conclusions: - on Mac: bricksmith is a real good app to create your models with, it is well integrated and fast to use. It has a small learning curve. It features all the bricks available in LDraw. - on Mac: LDD is a very up to date and nicely Internet integrated app, for me the biggest downside is that not all bricks are available for model building. My winner is bricksmith. On emulated PC: many apps didn't install well and gave plenty errors, probably because DirectX 3D cannot be used in VirtualBox. I didn't feel like trying to install bootcamp as I needed to make a backup of my HD and time was limited. LeoCad installed well, but had some issues displaying menus of the program correctly. I was able to open a bricksmith created .ldr file :-) The resulted model was ugly :-( many of the bricks where out of place and some didn't even show up. I tried to fix the model, but it took to long to do. I could export the leoCAD exploded model into Blender, an opensource 3D app. But the final problem was that non of the colors showed up :-( So I completely gave up on the idea of creating high resolution rendered images of my models. I'll just create my models in real bricks and take nice pictures of them, use bricksmith/lpub to keep the building instructions of my created models for later years.

Thank you for the welcome. I started out with the LDD forum to end here introducing myself :-)

A quick introduction. I'm belgian living in the Philippines for 8 years now. I got back to my lego after my son started playing with duplo now... This got me completely by surprise I must say. There are no lego shops here in Cebu and if you find a Lego box, it is 10x the price as displayed on the web, so I've been relaying on web shops and friends in Belgium for my Lego. I've no specific interest, but I like to watch the fantastic MOCs made by many. Now i'm trying to figure out how to make high quality renderings of my creations made in LDraw, apparently a challenge when you are on Mac. EB is a great place to be, I've been following it for a while now and now decided to join. rgds p

Hi all, I'm back to Lego building, last time I made something was at least 12 years ago. Now that my son starts playing with duplo, the lego bug came back to me. This is my first post on this great forum that I've been following for a while now. I would like to save my lego creation for my son when he is big enough to build them as well. I'm currently doing this in Bricksmith for OS X 10.6.8 and I create simple plans with LPUB. After a few models, my idea is to make photo realistic images from the ldr files in povray... unfortunately the povray 3.6 does not work on my intel... After googling a while, I could not find a working solution to get the ldr files converted to anything that a 3d rendering program can understand on OS X 10.6. Most of my results where from 2008-2009, that is long time ago in software age terms. There is a command line program L3P, that I tried, but I cannot figure it out on how to use it. Is there anybody here on the forum who has experience with rendering his ldraw creations into nice photo realistic 3d images that would be willing to help me out with some hints and tips. thx Philippe