Scrubs

I put 2 area lamps with the mesh option ticked. Only transparent and glow in the dark elements can emit lights in Mecabricks. No it is made in their software. All real time with ray tracing in 4K. Yes of course the title can be updated.

I have been working on improving the Mecabricks material system for the past couple of weeks and I put everything online today. New features include: New Glitter and Speckle Materials Improved material appearance in the viewport and at render time thanks to a new type of texture (materials map) Custom roughness parameters crafted for each part and used at render time for increased photorealism (WIP as each element has to be manually assessed) Full rendering support of multi-material decorated parts and transparent elements with colour gradient. Rendering improvements are already available for the online render mode and will be rolled out to the Advanced Add-on for Blender shortly. Here is an example with the Batman Minifigure (image has been made only using a browser and Mecabricks). You can see that the parts all have a different surface finish like the helmet which is not as smooth as a normal brick in real life. LEGO Batman by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr P.S. as a nice addition, the render farm now includes a new GPU NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti which was gifted by NVidia. The PhysX team has been playing with Mecabricks models

I recently added the support for shadows in the Mecabricks viewport. Result is actually quite good. It works with the following types of lights: Sun, Point and Spot. I made a little video to show how it works. That is very simple anyway.

Great stuff. If you use the Mecabricks render mode, there are a few things you can do to get even better results. First one is to check the “subdivide” checkbox for rounded parts that are close to the camera. It will smooth them pretty well. Second one would be to switch the denoiser from Cycles to Intel denoiser with fast quality. It will work well for interior renders with low samples. Last one would be to set the dispersion to 0.01 in the compositor tab. Hope it helps.

I have been rewriting a big part of the Mecabricks app in the past couple of weeks to make the platform ready for the future. Building on these modifications, I am happy to introduce volumetric lighting in the render mode. The new box object is available under the lamp menu in the tool bar. Here is the first image ever made using this new tool: volumetric Lighting by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

Currently, only the cuda cores are used at render time by Cycles. Like you suggested, the other functions of the RTX card may be used in the future by Blender for real time rendering like for the viewport or eevee but I don't think it will make a difference for Cycles anyway. Nonetheless it is a very powerful GPU.

I actually added a new component to the rig today. There is now a nvidia RTX 2070 GPU in one of the rendering nodes. From what I tried, this card is pretty much 4x faster than the other GTX 1050Ti that I have.

The online rendering mode is using a special system that I designed (hardware and software) and which is hosted at home. You have access to 60 threads of CPU coupled with 5 GTX 1050ti GPUs which I may upgrade soon. So it is likely to render much faster than your average home computer. That is one of benefit among others. Instead of waiting half a day for a decent high resolution image it only takes a couple of minutes. The Blender add-ons work with any models exported from Mecabricks. Just build or open a model online in the Mecabricks workshop (Mecabricks doesn't have any offline mode), export it as a 3D file and import it into Blender. That is very easy to use, but you need some basic Blender and 3D knowledge to set up the camera, the lighting, the depth of field, compositing, etc. You can try the workflow with the free version of the add-on anyway to get an idea. The Advanced add-on materials are the same as the rendering mode with roughly the same options. However in the render mode, you don't really need any particular knowledge as everything is done for you (samples, light paths, denoising, etc.). What you see is what you get. You also have access to high resolution geometry for the minifigure with mould marks in order to increase realism. To tell you the truth, everything I do now is made using the render mode. I also plan to add much more easy to use options like volume scattering (fog), animation support, external 3D mesh and decoration, etc. That is a good compromise for people who don't want to spend too much time learning technical stuff but want to get professional looking images of their work. Just give it a try. It is mostly free unless you want to use the special options. Hope it helps. Here is an image I made yesterday only using the Mecabricks render mode to showcase the new rat element I modeled: Apocalypseburg Cafe by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

No, you need an account. This is not to track you but just for technical reasons. The system needs to know who to deliver the result to as it runs in the background and you don’t need to have your browser open while rendering. That said it only requires 3 things to create an account: a username, an email address and a password.

I have been giving some love to the Mecabricks rendering mode in the past few weeks: The user interface has been standardised across all settings panels. The project viewer has been redesigned to include more detailed information about live rendering The rendering system has been updated to support animation Projects can be canceled Intel Open Denoising Image based on Artificial Intelligence has been added as a denoising option with 3 qualities available. It works very well for very low samples. Projects can be composited as many times as you need to test multiple settings without re-rendering images. Depth of Field setting is available for free renders. Background image setting is available for free renders Free renders do not include any watermarks

I have been doing a lot of work the last few days to improve the user interface and add new options for the rendering mode. I mainly focused on lighting with the support for glow in the dark elements and reworked materials. Here are a couple of examples to show what can be done online: Mecabricks Emission Materials by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr Aragog's Lair by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr Most of these updates are also available on the Mecabricks Advanced Add-on for Blender 2.80.

For once I will be on the side of studio. So basically, you mean that paying for a software is not acceptable? Do you know how much work goes into it? Love doesn't pay the bills

You just copy and paste the line above in the browser console when the workshop is loaded and the model you want to save is open. If you try it, you will see that the console output some text. Copy and paste this output in a simple text file. I started another big rework of the scene graph to make Mecabricks ready for the next step. It will probably be only a click on a button in the future.

You will need to use the console in your browser. That is simple. Just type this and copy the output in a file on your computer. JSON.stringify(GBLMenubar.toJSON(GBLScene.main))

No offense taken. Your last post makes sense. I spend so much time working on this software and the community that goes with, that I have to defend it a bit any now and then against misconceptions. The issue with stud.io is that it belongs to a company. So you would think that they have the means to innovate. However to a few exceptions, they mainly copy what is existing in LDD, LDraw based software and Mecabricks as well while using and abusing of something that doesn't cost them a cent - the LDraw part library - without really giving anything back.

I think they try too hard to copy LDD. Multiple full time developers to get to that after a few years, that is almost sad. Anyway, the welding torch 13793 is the latest part converted to the new flex system: Flexible Welding Torch by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

Come on man. You know what I meant. I am not a big company (and not a company at all) and I do it to the best of my knowledge. We are not talking about personal details and credit card numbers here. To date, there hasn't been any issues. I know you are preaching for LDraw and Stud.io but let Mecabricks a chance for anybody interested in

Hello, No worries. So currently, files are stored securely on the server. I am thinking about a way to export/import none 3D files (a format close to what I store) but there are actually a good number of technical issues I need to solve first. If everybody was behaving online that would be simple but that is not the case. I need to prevent any damages when files modified outside of Mecabricks would be reimported. The other one is a solution to handle old files when I update the format. When it is all online, all of these things are seamless for users. Everything is working whatever update I make even deep in the system. Otherwise, you can currently export in open 3D formats like obj, stl or collada.

I started to convert old solid parts to the new flex system. For example, whip 88704 is now a flexible element on Mecabricks:

It is now available to everybody to play with. Just load the Mecabricks workshop in your browser.

A real life example with the flexible vine:

Latest development. I completed the new workshop set of tools for flexible LEGO elements. I will start designing the definition files for all currently existing Mecabricks flexible parts so that this development version can be soon become the production version.

This is a work in progress. Dealing with non stretchable flexible parts is a matter of adding a constraint on the length of the paths. It will be added later. This is not as simple as it seems though as it will require a good amount of recalculation for the complex elements with multiple paths. First release something then add options To reset the geometry just get out of the flex mode and press the undo button.

Yes for sure that would quite easy with the new system. I would need to get the real one though to get accurate dimensions.

You have been faster than me I just posted my work in another topic.