jamesster

Assets.lif isn't actually what LDD loads the brick database from, oddly. It contains a file called db.lif, which is then copied to AppData, and that file in Appdata is the file that's maintained and updated - and reinstalling the program doesn't delete it, IIRC. Assuming you're on windows, you'll find it under C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer. That's what you'll want to delete or replace, possibly along with other files around that location.

While reworking some texture loading stuff in my converter recently, I noticed some decorations included in LDD that LDD doesn't actually seem to load successfully... They're selectable in the decal application tool, but since they don't visually appear, it looks like you're just selecting a blank/unprinted option. It seems the difference is they're saved as greyscale + alpha (2 channel) PNGs... Most decoration textures in LDD are RGBA (4 channels), and one is RGB (3 channels), which load fine. The question is, does this happen for everyone, on every system? I've had a few folks I know check it out, and they've gotten the same results as me, but I think we've all been on Windows... Does anyone have any luck with this? Or is LDD's texture loading just broken for everybody? Here's what the decals should look like, if they worked out of the box - I re-saved them as full color RGBA PNGs: The arms don't appear to be mapped correctly, and the teddy bear as a whole is pretty messed up (there's a lot of other decals that apply to the wrong areas on that piece)... But the others seem fine. Here's the decoration IDs, and what parts/surfaces they're mapped to: 602741, mapped to part 3815 (minifigure hips, front hinge) 606689, mapped to part 3816 (minifigure leg right, front) 606690, mapped to part 3817 (minifigure leg left, front) 609549, mapped to part 3818 (minifigure right arm) 609550, mapped to part 3819 (minifigure left arm) 609608, mapped to part 3816 (minifigure leg right, front) 609609, mapped to part 3817 (minifigure leg left, front) 609711, mapped to part 93219 (baseball cap) 609714, mapped to part 98382 (teddy bear bottom) 610241, mapped to part 3816 (minifigure leg right, sides) 610242, mapped to part 3817 (minifigure leg left, sides) And here's the model in the above screenshots, if you want to see if any textures load for you: http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/jamesster/Other/what.lxfml There's also one more greyscale PNG; decoration 610654, mapped to part 13565... a cowboy hat, which doesn't actually have any decal areas... and the decal is entirely transparent. So that's rather useless. Shrug.

New release: https://github.com/Terrev/3DXML-to-OBJ/releases/tag/v1.9.0 Updated engine version to 2019.2.12f1 and did some other general maintenance. The engine upgrade means it can now render very large meshes that were previously over Unity's mesh size limit (they were always exported to the OBJ file though, so as far as raw functionality goes nothing really changed there). There is one small fix to the actual conversion functionality: It turns out there's exactly one decoration in LDD that's RGB, while the other nearly 2000 of them are RGBA. The converter previously assumed all textures were RGBA and would choke on it, but that's fixed now. So if you've ever wanted to export a model with this awkwardly pixelated floral pattern, then boy howdy is this the update for you: As always, I recommend using the 64-bit version, especially if you need to convert very large models.

Oooh, that's looking neat! Keep it up!

While posting this I remembered there's some other concept art floating around that maybe some folks here would like: https://www.artstation.com/ducede Loads of Elves art (apparently another potential name for the theme was Elvendale as you can see on the WIP box art). Misc other things too - some stuff for the LEGO Portal Racers game, and his portfolio has concept art for what look like girl-oriented LEGO Fusion games/sets that never saw the light of day (an underwater mermaid city, and a very purple/gold ninja village... I wonder if that was going to be its own thing, or if it would have been tied into Ninjago in any way?).

Stumbled across this several months ago, thought maybe some folks here would find it curious: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0Wexy All the art there is under one post for Dino Racers, but on his website he lists them as two separate concepts, the other being "Hero Knights": https://www.wasabi-robot.com/portfolio Pretty outlandish designs for the time but much more in line with the sort of action themes and vehicle sets you'd expect today.

I'm traveling at the moment and just stopped at a random Walmart, which happened to be exactly as they were wheeling out a bunch of new LEGO stuff to stock, including Hidden Side sets: https://imgur.com/a/gUiZl6m Refraining from buying any until I get back home though, wouldn't be able to build them until then anyway and don't need to take up more space in the car.

Hey! Unfortunately not - I figured that with 3DXML files needing to be captured individually, there wouldn't be much demand for it. I've been thinking about redoing this project as a simple command line tool, though - might not be soon, but, eventually, that'd be good to do. Just got some other projects on my plate first, which I'm getting close to wrapping up. If/when that happens, it'd definitely include that.

I didn't do much, but yeah, it's pretty curious stuff. I half wonder if the weird not-quite-LEGO style of the second one was an attempt at getting around the problem the first encountered, with kids shows not being allowed to be based too directly on real toys...

Straying from the topic of Pirates, but just a correction - the magazine showed "Techdroid 2" as the same minifigure as Commander X (without the helmet), not Techdroid 1. Techdroid 1 was consistently the blue droid, and Techdroid 2 was supposed to be the red droid in that magazine. There's a 1997 large UK catalog which gets it correct. https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Techdroid_I#Gallery (Again, I usually wouldn't recommend trusting that site too much, though I wrote what's on that page and the images speak for themselves - the caption for the magazine pic could use an adjustment though...)

Since we've been discussing old Pirates stuff here lately... Here's something most of you folks might not have seen yet: The video title isn't quite accurate - while this was born from the core team behind LEGO Island, it isn't an advertisement for the game, it's a pilot/demo for a proposed TV show. As described to me back in 2010 by the late Wes Jenkins, creative director of LEGO Island and also this pilot: Back in 2010, the footage above hadn't been found - a brief clip of it was once present on one of Wes's websites, but the archive of that site hadn't been found yet, so all we had to go by were the occasional descriptions provided by him and somebody else who remembered seeing it on his site years prior. Here's another description he gave, in an interview for a fan site: Wes unfortunately passed in 2017, and in short, many of the materials from his LEGO projects (mainly audio and video tapes) were given to Lorin (the uploader of the video above), a musician and friend of Wes who'd worked with him on everything from radio shorts to LEGO Island to the above pilot - he has a variety of other LEGO Island-related uploads you might find interesting, mainly music tracks for the game and such. Now, this part is a bit of a tangent... But, with two similar projects that happened close to each other, it'd be good to distinguish between them. It also makes for quite a contrast in, uh... overall effort and direction, haha. So, the following year in 1998, there was another (completely unrelated) attempt at a LEGO TV show, animated by Vision-Scape... The history of this TV show attempt also ties into LEGO Island, but in a much stranger way... LEGO was planning to have a tie-in video game for the show, and work on it was under way at Krisalis (who also developed LEGO Chess and LEGOLAND). When the TV show got axed, somebody at LEGO thought "Hey, it'd be a shame to throw away the work on the game, and one of the kids looks kind of like Pepper from LEGO Island... Let's use it as the basis for a sequel!" So, the direction of the project was shifted to LEGO Island 2... Then, some time later, LEGO took the project away from Krisalis and gave it to Silicon Dreams, keeping the basic design but essentially restarting the project again. More details are available here. (I usually wouldn't advise trusting lego.wikia/fandom.com, but I wrote that portion of the article myself, so I can vouch for its accuracy haha).

Linked to this topic last night while chatting with a friend, who mentioned: I don't have any scans on hand of whatever's being referred to though/don't have time at the moment to go digging around for it.

Off the top of my head, both Captain Redbeard and Ironhook appear simultaneously as distinct characters in at least one of the pirates audio dramas, and in the Time Cruisers comics (the specific part I'm thinking of - and a translated English version; note his German name doesn't directly translate to the English name though... It translate to Blackbeard, despite his beard not being black, haha).

By the way, here's an alternate version of this stopmotion without dialogue, in this 1989 shopvideo - I'm guessing so it could be shown in various other countries speaking different languages:

BTW, this is a bit of an aside, but as far as Camilla in LEGO Battles goes... A few years back, I came across this demo reel on Vimeo from a guy named Ty who worked on the LEGO Battles games. About 22 seconds in, there's a brief animation of two knights fighting that didn't appear in either LEGO Battles or LEGO Battles: Ninjago, so I emailed him about it out of curiosity. Turns out LEGO Battles: Ninjago started as a direct sequel to LEGO Battles, and the clip with the knights was an art test for what the cutscenes could look like. Then as development continued, the direction soon shifted to a mostly Ninjago focused game - but anyway... I also asked about all the 80s/90s stuff in the game, what they had for reference material - turns out I couldn't have asked a better person; he was the resident LEGO expert on the development team, loves Bricklink and has a big collection from when he was a kid, and was glad folks picked up on all the 80s/90s references. They tried to pack in as many as possible, especially since they were making an RTS and needed more characters/vehicles/etc for units than what LEGO currently had on the market. Chances are, naming that character Camilla was probably his idea. I remember being really surprised when I saw her listed on the game's website back in 2009 - "wait, somebody remembered that old comic??", haha.

Thanks for scanning these - I have Roger's activity book but not Will's, been curious about it for a while.

Here's some discussion of it on another forum from when it was first uploaded (though some of the formatting in the posts is now broken): https://www.rockraidersunited.com/topic/5440-retro-lego-comicsstorybooksanimated-cartoons-general-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=104833

I don't have proper scans of them, as the books are too stiff to really fit into a scanner without doing damage to them... But I did take photos of them; not a perfect solution, but they're readable at least. I'll PM you links to ZIPs of them, you can do whatever you want with them from there (re-upload them to your website, etc).

The file is cut off part way through. Sorry, as far as I know there's not really anything that can be done.

That also appears to be something outside of my control as far as I know, as I simply pass the input string to this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.directory.exists?view=netframework-4.7.2 Those are assemblies of bricks, not bricks themselves. If you look in the Assemblies folder in db.lif, you will find a 84638.lxfml file that defines the bricks that comprise it. (And if you try to open it in LDD, LDD will say that 5 pieces could not be placed, as it doesn't let you place minifigure torsos, arms, hands, etc individually).

The file paths in your screenshot look rather odd, granted I haven't touched a Mac in ages myself, but I sent it over to a friend with one for testing and it worked a-ok for them. Can you paste the full directory paths you're trying to use? As for the UI, that's pretty much controlled by Unity itself, it's an old UI system but it's convenient to use - I wasn't aware of it having any quirks with retina displays, though it makes sense it would given everything is controlled by measures of pixels. I think I'd have to just switch over to the newer UI system entirely and it'd (hopefully) scale properly.

This is the tricky part. I think some LDraw based programs might have some methods of replacing bricks with simple stretched cubes to save the poly count, but it's been quite a while since I've used any so I don't remember details. As far as LDD goes, this conversion method retains the poly reduction LDD does on the fly, and gives models much more optimized and ready for realtime rendering. But it has a few downsides; it's relatively cumbersome and involves multiple programs (though still only takes a few seconds once you know the workflow) and most bricks of the same color are merged together into a single mesh (which may be a good or bad thing, depending on what your goal is). If optimization isn't a concern, there's a variety of other ways to get complete LEGO models as OBJ, most of them involving LDraw-based programs. I'm sure other folks here could give more details on those, I'm rather out of the loop on LDraw stuff. Edit - Also, Mecabricks has OBJ exporting - as far as I know it doesn't have any automatic optimization like what you're looking for, but it's definitely worth checking out: https://mecabricks.com/

It turned out to be a simple problem not even with my code particularly - Unity's Mesh class was slowing it down. In the 3DXML to OBJ project, I'd made my own minimalistic CustomMesh class used for most things instead, because back then, Unity couldn't accept meshes with more than 65535 vertices (mesh index buffers could only be 16 bit; it now supports 32 bit index buffers as well, which can have up to 4 billion vertices). When I did this project, I thought "oh, I can just use the normal Mesh class now", but apparently that led to it doing who-knows-what entirely behind the scenes when the OBJ export code used those meshes. I went back to a simple CustomMesh class, and now the entire LDD brick library (4186 bricks) converts in 1 minute, 2 seconds on my machine - much better than the previous 11 minutes, 22 seconds. New release available at the link in the first post.

Thanks! I'm still tinkering with improving the speed - it seems the OBJ exporting code is to blame for it; large pieces like the 32x32 and 48x48 baseplates are loaded and can be displayed on-screen almost instantly, but writing the OBJs for them currently takes 1-2 minutes, which is rather ridiculous. I have to get ready for work now but I'll see about narrowing down the issue tonight or within the next few days. Edit - What's got me especially curious is that the OBJ exporting code in my 3DXML to OBJ converter works fine, and can process a 48x48 baseplate very quickly. The OBJ exporting code in this project is based off of the 3DXML project's code, but one of the changes I made must have slowed it down significantly. I have a few ideas as to what but won't be able to test until tonight. Welcome to Eurobricks! If you only want a specific part, LEGO Digital Designer can give you the ID for it in the lower left corner when you place it in the scene and select it, or websites like Bricklink can usually be of help too.

Lovely work! Thanks for posting.