Superkalle

Good ideas there Lalror. About them can you explain some more about the following three, which I'm not sure I understand: 1) Better UI. 2) User made collections of bricks, as seen in Lego Universe. 3) Able to rotate multiple pieces along the same vertex at the same time.

I'm not sure I understand you posting strategy here skymapper You've allready ventilated your questions in this topic, so why would you want to post here too? Please avoid double posting. Thanks

Hi Spike. That's a pretty good idea. I'll look into it and see if it's easy to do and easy to maintain. The problems I guess is that it's a matter of 1) extracting the prices, 2) maintaining the price list, and 3) what currency to use. And even if I do manage to make something useful, please note that it will only sum the price for the the bricks that are marked "DbM-brick" in LDD Manager. But, if you've designed your model with mostly such bricks, it will give you a good estimate of the price. Anyway, the best solution would in any case be to upload a part list directly to the PickABrick-site, and you would not only be able to check the price, but also buy the bricks, but I haven't managed to do that from LDD Manager.

The general rule in LDD is that only parts that are packaged as separte parts from the factory are available as individual elements in LDD. In other words, premounted parts, such as minifigs arms, legs, and hands are not available. So what about the 2x2 turntable I hear you us say - e.g. how the bottom half was used as grebble in the Taj Mahal set. Well, there is really no reason why it couldn't be made available as separate parts in LDD, but at the moment it isn't (don't know why to be honest).

Can you ellaborate on that a bit. What kind of features should such a tool have compared to what you can allready do in LDD?

And here's one from me.

Love those little animals you post Lalror Keep up the good work

Sorry, but this topic is not the place for these kind of models. Firstly, you can only put models here that have been released (i.e. that you can use an official building instruction to re-create). Secondly, you need to provide the LXF.

If I understand bricklayer correctly, he was asking if there are any raytracing apps for LDD that can produce images like with POV-RAY. And the quick answer is unfortuntely no. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) Unlike LDraw, geometries in LDD is not in an open format, so they are not available for 3rd parties to play around with. The only open aspect of LDD is at the moment the LXF file format. 2) The LDD geometries are natively in OpenGL-format in LDD, and even if there was a way to extract them, converting to a more generic format like 3DS is not easy. However, there is a cool tool that will extract and create 3D XML files discussed here, but even so, you still have the problem of converting to a more generic format. 3) The geometries are quite simple in LDD, i.e. there is for example no modelled bevels on the edges. This means that bricks will appear quite flat even if ray-traced. I know there was some dicussions if and how you could add bevels programatically after extracting the geometries (bascially using the same algorithm that LEGO uses to create the brick edge outlines in LDD), but I'm not sure how far that went.

Good work Captain. Perhaps it's time to try something bigger Have a look at the index and see if there is any set that hasn't been done yet.

Hi there Welcome to the forum. Regarding uploading LXF-files, the easiest is to start a Brickshelf account, because unlike other image hosting sites, BrickShelf allows you to upload LXF-files as well as images.

Apperantly you can move the generated 3DXML files directly into CATIA if that's of any value. For other software I don't know, I guess it's a matter of converting the 3D XML format. It'd be really cool if one could make some nice ray-tracing images from these files. The only problem is off couse that the LDD geometries does not have any beveled edges on the bricks, so I'm not sure how good it would look.

A friend at work showed me this the other day. It's a freeware software from Dassault Systems that is part of the 3DVia product suite. It basically allows you to extract the OpenGL/DirectX data from your graphics card. So naturally I had to give it a go in LDD with one of my MOCs. As output you get 3D XML files that can be viewed in the freeware viewer (also from Dassault). Now, if these files can be converted to any other format, or if they can be used various post-processing I don't know, but its pretty cool you can get 3D models from any application that easy. Read more here Download software (and the 3D XML viewer) here

Thanks DLuders. You're the man! And that's plenty enough . Sometimes I feel it's better to show 'em a good hand of examples so they know that a certain technique is fairly common. And this one eveidently is.

Yes, yes, yes - now we're talking boys And keep 'em coming if you have more examples

Hi DLuders Even though a super example, with screenshots and all ( ) I was actually thinking more of the error when the end of the 5.5 axle would stick out a few millimeter, and thus not allows that a brick could be placed against the end.

I got a mail from the LDD team, where they wonder about the bug with the 5.5 axle (59426 in LDD, 32209 in BL). I seem to recall that it wouldn't fit in certain official sets re-created in LDD (the axle was too long). The question is: in which sets didn't it work and where was it placed in those sets? References to the official instruction manual (w. page) would be much appreciated.

The import/export works, but in my experience it doesn't produce so reliable results - many bricks are lost in the conversion. But for simpler models, it could work.

Glad it worked out for you Dream Team

It's a bug, plain and simple. Thanks for noting, I'll fix it in the next release. As a workaround you can do a Search&Replace on the generated XML-code.

From what I noticed there wasn't any Lego at any partiularly good prices and there wasn't any event specific exclusives (besides that you could get a 1x8 tiles with LEGOWorld 2011 printed on it). But they did sell the exclusive sets if that is what you meant.

Brickdoctor is right, I didn't build it. If you click the provided link you get all the info about the builder. Even so, I'll clarify the first post

And another piece to the puzzle is added. Thanks CM.

And speaking of SR3D, here is a picture of a model done by a couple of danish guys for Dynaway. I saw the built up model at the recent Legoworld 2011 Copenhagen and got a chance to talk to the guys. It was then I learnt that the CAD model was done in SR3D. And here the real deal

Found this cool rendering while browsing the web. Built by suparMacho with SR3D and rendered in pov-ray. This just shows that LDraw/pov-ray still rocks when it comes to rendering. Looks absolutely amazing. And cool that it was built with Sergios tool. More info here (Via BrothersBrick)