LDD2PovRay

Dear Readers, I have no excuses. Against all promises this blog does not grow as fast as I have planned.

However something incredibly cool has happened so I must speak up and break the radio silence. We have had Lego Digital Designer for a while that continues to be the friendliest LEGO creator software that cannot produce nice renders. We have had POV-Ray as well which is free and creates nice images. Putting the two next to another yields quite satisfying results, but saying that it's a lot of work would be an understatement.

More precisely speaking, it used to be a lot of work. Because LDD2PovRay is ready. It promises combining friendly editing with world-class images in a way that works for everyone. The images speak for themselves.

There is one nit though. It only works on Windows, so I won't be able to test it for a while.

Buildings and scenes from Hungary

It is well known that I like LEGO Architecture sets. Not so long ago I posted a review of the 21011 Brandenburg Gate on kockagyar.blog.hu (in Hungarian) that triggered some of the fans to build several famous buildings and scenes from around the country. Many of them sent me the model they created so that I can render them in nice quality. Let me show you the result, click on the images to see them in large:

The Hungarian Parliament, Budapest (Sárkányapu)	The Parliament from another angle (Sárkányapu)
Heroes square, Budapest (Könyvtároslány / Haynau)	"Truncated" church, Debrecen (Yooha)
The Great Church, Debrecen (Yooha)	The University of Debrecen (Yooha)
The Dome of Eger (Yooha)	The Dome in microscale (Yooha)
A kilenclyukú híd, Hortobágy (Mnarko)	The puszta (Mnarko)

LDD Pov-Ray Rendering tutorial

Several people asked me to provide more details on rendering LEGO models like the Trabi or the MiG-15. Until the surprise is built, let me entertain you with a tutorial on how to render LEGO models.

Before we start, let me underline that this is by no means a straightforward process. You should start only if you are ready to edit programming-language-like text files and download, unzip and manually organize files. It needs several hours, some debugging and tweaking, and possibly more hours to compute the final image.

Ok, if you have read so far, then you are at least curious to know what it takes. What follows is based on Koyan's excellent tutorial with some tweaks. Let's see how a typical render is made!

Step 1: I install LDraw. LDraw is an community-maintained database of LEGO bricks that will be needed for our photorealistic renders. As you can guess, this is needed once only. I download and unzip several files:

• LDraw official parts (Core Files and Libraries / LDraw Parts Library, zip format). I unzip them in a directory on my computer. This is my LDraw directory.
• Many bricks are not in the official release. I download the LDraw unofficial parts as well. Unzip those files as well and move them in the LDraw directory too. Some files will already exist, I don't overwrite them.
• LGEO is another parts library that is made especially for POV-Ray renders. It contains fewer parts but those are nicely modeled. I download and unzip it into a separate directory.

| The original dome in  Lego Digital Designer |

Five things you may not know about LDraw

As a kid my dream was to have so many bricks that I never run out of them during building. As time has passed I have realized that this is never going to happen. But there is a small hope - you always have enough when building from virtual bricks.

This post promotes LDraw. This is a free program that can be used just like some serious piece of 3D CAD software - to build models from Lego bricks. For example like that:


Matt Wagner, a famous Lego builder had a guest editorial on the Brothers Brick blog titled Five things you may not know about LDraw . It is worth reading, I think it is a great intro to LDraw.
Besides LDView you can also learn how to make raytraced images using Koyan's tutorial on how to render LDraw images with POV-Ray.



Now, if you happen to browse Brickshelf and find some .LDR files - you should know what it is!

(As a sidenote, Lego has their own official building program: Lego Digital Designer. I'll write about it another time.)