msx80

man i love those kind of spaceship. great job! and the way you filled the niches with greebling..! Also, the black/olive green combo is awesome, i used it myself too with great results

wow the exaust smoke really look great, it captures the action moment perfectly! great dragon too :)

super cool model, and great action shot too!

you mean replacing the code %LDDCAMERA% with its substitution? That would mean that the next time you render there would be no substitution, as there is no code (it works by simple string substitution). I could instead output the replaced string somewhere so users can see that. I guess i could, but i'm afraid it would be too confusing. I'll think about it. Ok first, to clarify, this is how Bluerender works: it loads the 3 scripts at startup, and then it uses the buffers in the tabs, not reading the files anymore. So if you changed the files instead of the buffers, while the program was running, the changes would have not picked up. Then the three scripts are joined to obtain a single script (there's actually no difference between the tabs, you could move things from the light to the material or setup and it would work. It's just a convenience), which is the Sunflow scene. Third, for some reason there are inconsistencies between the pdf and the actual code. I found out some days ago while working on textures (it looks like the code is more advanced). So maybe this is one of them. What code did you add? The "options::options" block doesn't work, but this one should: trace-depths { diff 1 refl 4 refr 4 } Try putting it in the setup script and play with the parameters as shown in the pdf (the bottle examples). This is the class that does the parsing. If you can read some java code, it's not hard to see the grammar. Let me know!

Here's a small preview :)

And i have yet to post building instructions :P

Sector 5 Secondary Warehouse, Andy is piloting his Octan Mule Andy: "And this shift is finally over, i can go hom.." Loud Speaker: "Employee Andy Rigel is required at the personnel office immediately!" Andy: "Oh my god, what did i do this time?!" Personnel Office Andy: "Please don't fire me!" Officier: "Oh don't worry my friend! We have wonderful news for you! We heard you want to be a real pilot, so we're reassigning you to a completely risk-free exploration mission!" Andy: "Really?! They told me nobody is sent to space before years of work!" Officier: "That's right, but we.. ehm.. like you very much! And we needed an expendab..ehm extraordinary pilot like you!" Andy: "Wonderful! I like you too!" Officier: "Great! So, You'll scout the planet Hennigan II for the Octan Corporation. Tomorrow you'll meet the mission specialist on sector 6!" Andy: "Oh.. isn't Hennigan II the planet where we lost a team, some days ago?" Officier: "Oh yes, but you'll just orbit it, you surely don't want to land right? Ahah" The day after, Sector 6 Operative: "Hi, i'm your operative contact! And this is your Octan Wasp, one of the smallest exploration ships of the corporation!" Andy: "It's awesome!" Operative: "So jump in! I'll explain the controls!" Lots of explaining later Operative: "Good, now i'll press this button and you'll take off!" Andy: "What? i'm starting now? But i have to pee!" Operative: "And.. GO!" Andy: "AAAAAHHHH" In space Andy: "Finally, i'm in space! My dream has come true.. sniff" Andy: "If only this ship had a toilet!" Some time later, the planet is in sight Andy: "That's the planet! I'll make two orbits as required by the mission and head back!" Radio: "Perfect! By the way, is everything ok with the ship? is the fuel gauge indicating enought? Just saying.." Andy: "Uhm.. hey! It's almost on empty! How can it be?!" Radio: "Ops! There must have been some problem with refueling! Looks like you'll need to land on the planet!" Andy: "But.. it's dangerous! some people died there, and they were experienced scouts!" Radio: "Don't worry, we'll help you! Maybe you could take a look around for us, since you're there.." Andy: "Oh.. ok.. thanks for helping me!" Radio (wispering): "He can't be buying it.." Andy: "Buying what?" Radio: "Oh nothing, nothing!" Later Andy: "I can see some ground, there's a lot of vegetation there! Landing will not be easy!" Radio: "Oh, you'll surely find a way!" Andy: "AAAHAHAAAAAAAA" The ship crash-land on a tree Andy: "I landed! Almost!" Radio: "Well done pilot!" Andy jumps out Andy: "Well, this planet doesn't look that bad! Maybe i worried for nothing!" Radio: "Yeah, maybe!" To be continued The Octan Wasp

Thanks everybody for the great feedback! Woah, that's just huge :O Well they're very different. LDDtoPovray does some processing inbetween LDD and Povray, such as the bevels, or the Lego logo, primitive substitution etc, while bluerender just feed the original geometries as-is to the renderer. Indeed without bevels the bricks just merge together :) I noted your suggestions, they'll be in the next release Show us something :) You're welcome! :) i've seen the renders in sci-fi, great models! Decors are on the way, both in blueprint and bluerender :) Great renders! The red pickup really shines, while the arctic truck suffer from the "sun behind the model" problem. For the excavator: LDD lowers the ground "on-demand" to adapt it to the lowest point of the model while bluerender does not, it's fixed at height 0. You can change it manually in the "setup" panel, there's a comment there that explains how. Yes, the trasparents are way too dark, but i haven't been able to find a setting that looked better. If anyone want to tinker with the "materials" tab and find some decent values :)

The second one :) If high quality could be made faster, they would have already made it in POV-Ray. It will never be a replacement for it. But let's say you make a small model and you want to show it quickly on flickr, you can do it right away without having your pc work all night and waiting the next day. What were the quality problem you noticed? Maybe it's something i can fix. One thing i noticed is that sometime, depending on the direction of your model, you get the sunlight "behind" the model and you see the unlit side, for an unpleasant result. Turning the sun direction in the "light" settings can fix this. Ops, i have to fix the readme :P Uhm there's an "aspect" ratio in the "camera" setting under "Setup". Have you changed that too? I'll see if i can make it automatic, it's quite obvious that it should match the screen resolution. Thanks for your feedback and for taking the risk despite the warnings. I hope they'll solve the problem soon :)

Can you show me the warnings? What software are you using? I'm I just ran a scan with Norton Power Eraser and it found nothing. I also re-downloaded the lwjgl binaries from here and it looks identical to the one i have here. I'm downloading Symantec Endpoint Protection to check with it too. Ok, i searched the lwjgl forum and it looks like the problem is on the library itself, they report the same warning about Trojan.Gen.SMH.2 http://forum.lwjgl.org/index.php?topic=5590.msg30895#msg30895 I'll ask there, but i'm starting to think it's a false positive

omg really?? i'll take a look right now. I downloaded the new library just a couple of days ago

wow, that's a sweet model and a great render! :) glad to see it works!

- The program really only need the database file of LDD to read geometries etc. If LDD is installed, it will autolocate it. If it's not installed, you will be asked to locate the db.lif file manually. This way you can simply copy the file to a new machine without installing the software (that's how i use it at work.. but don't tell around :P). The file by default is installed under: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer\db.lif - Yes, Sunflow is integrated, no need to download anything else.

Thanks! good to hear the program works well :) I've just posted the official topic here nice cars btw!

Thanks to the open source SunFlow rendering system, i'm able to present: Bluerender A rendering engine for Lego Digital Designer. How it works: You just open the LXF file with Bluerender and click the big Render button. Optionally, you can choose an output png file and do a "preview" render: it will render the model in wireframe (useful for testing and framing your model). A set of default settings is provided that should looks good for most renders, but you can tinker with the scene description to use the full power of SunFlow. Rendering is fast, a 1024x768 image usually take no more than five minutes on average pc. This project came about as an experiment when i discovered that i could integrate SunFlow into Blueprint code with minimal effort. It's by no mean a competitor to Povray, which is slow but ultra-high quality, professional renderer. Features: Renders models, even big ones (tested on 12k piece models) Completely customizable scene Use camera settings from lxf file, so you can just frame your model in LDD. Support for LDD decorations and decoration substitution Limitations: many :P Documentation: A wiki is available with plenty of documentation. Using the renderer with default settings is quite simple. If you want to customize light, materials etc, you can change the scene description, simply edit the included scene.sc file. The syntax of the scene description is that of Sunflow and should be easy, there are some examples inside. Anyway some documentation is available here (note: it may be a little outdated at times). You can optionally have a custom scene file for each model: simply copy the scene.sc file and name it like your lxf model (for example, if you have spaceship.lxf, create the file spaceship.sc, in the same folder of course). You can override LDD decoration with your own adding lines like this in your scene file (the number is the decoration ID): ##CHANGEDECOR 59879 c:\path\to\custom\mydecor.png Issue Tracker: Have any bug or feature request? Be a good fellow and report it in our shiny issue tracker. Requirements: Java8 (revision 8u40 or better) Lego Digital Designer Disclaimer: Use at your own risk, i decline any responsability for anything that may happen to you using the program. Download: You can download Bluerender vers. 0005 here. Flickr Group: You can add your renders to the official Bluerender Lego Rendering group. Running on Mac: Some people were able to run Bluerender on Mac. Try the following instructions: Remove all java installations Install Java, but not from Oracle, from Homebrew instead. What's HomeBrew? I've no idea, but you can try following these instruction. Open a command prompt/shell/terminal, cd to the folder where you unzipped Bluerender Enter the following command: java -cp "bin/*" bluerender.BlueRender If the program manage to start, it will ask you to locate the db.lif file, you should find it here: /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/LEGO Company/LEGO Digital Designer/db.lif Special thanks: to Bublible for his help with the renderer. to Jackalope for his help testing the app on Mac. to Fabrizio for his precious time as beta tester. Screenshot: Example Output: (these models are taken from the web, not mine) More examples can be found here. Here you can find a 3027x2304 render of a 12000 parts model, took about 30 minutes. Changelog: 0005: Black is now real black #93 Glass is now lighter #82 (thanks to bublible) Implemented bublible chrome materials #73 (thanks to bublible) Corrected NPE with invalid color codes (default to white) #86 Implemented aliases parsing and caching #81, #68 360° rotation renders #71 can now place light with transform{} blocks #72 (thanks to bublible) overwrite and other options are now persisted #64 basic parameters are now in the app #65 changed default background to white 0004: Janino shaders now work Automatic aspect ratio Overwrite without asking checkbox No longer "forget" some flexible elements Correct background color reflection for mirrors (no more black) 0003: Model loading is fast again (even faster!) Some textured glass support (not perfect yet) Clickable scene label (opens the scene file) Self adjusting plane height Search file in db folder beside db.lif Bugfixes 0002: remembers last used folder ask before overwrite use a single scene.sc file instead of three files for setup, materials, lights scene files are not shown on the program anymore (was more confusion than anything) optional per-model scene file LDD decoration support custom decoration support 0001: initial release

Lol, i went for Bluerender in the end. I've prepared a package, you can find it here. I'll make a proper post later

that car on the table is so realistic.. impressive work!

It was this! Strage, i never heard this was a thing... I know windows somehow blocks some kind of downloaded files, didn't know you could check/disable it this way. Btw the correct way to unlock is -> Right Click -> Properties -> Unlock Now it works, thanks!

Hi there, the bat files are supposed to run on windows. On Mac there should be other "startup script" but i don't have access to a mac machine to develop them. If you can open the terminal, you could go to the program folder and give this command: java -Djava.library.path=./native/macosx/x64 -jar ./bin/blueprint.jar Let me know what it says

Hi there, i tryed installing the software on another pc and it gives me this error: Calling to constructor 'Installer.Windows.MainWindowLogic' generated an exception (something like this, i translated) in System.Windows.Markup.WpfXamlLoader.Load(XamlReader xamlReader, IXamlObjectWriterFactory writerFactory, Boolean skipJournaledProperties, Object rootObject, XamlObjectWriterSettings settings, Uri baseUri) in System.Windows.Markup.WpfXamlLoader.LoadBaml(XamlReader xamlReader, Boolean skipJournaledProperties, Object rootObject, XamlAccessLevel accessLevel, Uri baseUri) in System.Windows.Markup.XamlReader.LoadBaml(Stream stream, ParserContext parserContext, Object parent, Boolean closeStream) in System.Windows.Application.LoadBamlStreamWithSyncInfo(Stream stream, ParserContext pc) in System.Windows.Application.LoadComponent(Uri resourceLocator, Boolean bSkipJournaledProperties) in System.Windows.Application.DoStartup() in System.Windows.Application.<.ctor>b__1(Object unused) in System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs) in MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate method, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler)

fantastic! :)

Wouldn't that be VF2V ? :) Anyway, i'm using the working name of BlueRenderer but it doesn't sound so good either. An average machine, Intel I5 3.20 Ghz. Thanks! Here are some more renderings (some models are mine, some found on the net): http://imgur.com/a/lKCzB I've been experimenting to find a decent default set of settings for lights and colors, i think these one works good. I'll package it into a distribution as soon as i find the time so you can try and tinker with it

Thanks for the report, it actually happened to me some times. It's becouse when you remove the last step from a submodel, the submodel is still there but cannot be interacted with (as you only interact to steps) and cannot be deleted.

I don't know if renders like this would look right in building instructions. I think they should look more technical than realistic, but maybe i could experiment. Here's your model, took 0:01:14.8 to render at 1024x768. Maybe the light settings are not the best for a white model but it doesn't look bad i think! (and no texture for now.. at least not until they're supported in blueprint) PS looks like eurobrick stretch the image, you can see it in original form by clicking on it

1- no, Sunflow looks to be not developed anymore, unfortunately. But it seems like it's still used a lot around, the source code looks mature and the gallery is awesome. 2- currently, I export the geometry from Blueprint to a text file, stitch it together with some boilerplate rendering instructions and feed it to Sunflow. Eventually i could make a small GUI with a file chooser and a render button. If you have an LXF file for me to try, i can test it :) 3- i don't know, they're separated things. I could eventually ship them together to save some space i guess. Or you were thinking some other kind of integration?