One word: Amazing

It looks quite nice but, yeah, not real. I think it would be challenging to get it to look real that close up. I feel like there should be some visible reflectivity to the bricks, also the softness of the shadows betrays it somewhat.

Smeagol, who still hasn't gotten around to reading that script but will do it, uh, sometime

So did you have to do any tweaking to get those gaps-between-pieces to appear after you imported to Cinema 4D?

It looks Great!

I think Smeagol once said that he used a deformer to automatically spread the bricks apart slightly in Carrara. Maybe you should try that.

EDIT: Or, as Cartoonkid said below, you don't need an importer. Open the LDraw file in LeoCad, and export it from there.

Last edited by StudioL30 (January 23, 2011 (10:52am))

But you will lose the advantage of parts inheritance that the Ldraw importer provides.  The ldraw importer essentially imports the dat files from your ldraw parts folder.  And whatever changes you make to one piece applies to all copies of that piece in the model you imported because what the Ldraw importer does when importing the dat files is treat the same dat file as a duplicate and not as an individual piece.  You don't get that by exporting to 3ds via LeoCAD.

Plus LeoCAD does not always update its parts library the way Ldraw does so each time you update Ldraw's folder on your computer, you need to manually import them in LeoCAD.

For example: a 1x1 plate.  If you have multiple 1x1 plate in your model, all the 1x1 plates will receive the same changes you made to one plate.

I thought you had this problem solved six pages ago, BuilderBrothers.  If it helps, my Ldraw folder is directly under the C drive and the script is in C:\users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts and I have Python 2.5 installed.

Now in my opinion: the scaling is a simple but cheap way of creating gaps between pieces.  It looks good from far away, but up close, you won't see smooth corners that we see with real bricks.  I'm not sure about the deformer in Carrara but if you did use it, you would have to repeatedly apply the modifier to every individual piece.

I think I should create a thread for this...

To clarify, my parts folder is under C:\Ldraw\, not C:\Program Files\LDraw.  I just looked at the Ldraw importer code and the LDrawPath variable is set to "C:\Ldraw" (it's on the 91 line of the code)

...
from Blender.Mathutils import *
LDrawPath="C:\Ldraw"      # LDRAW base installation directory
Scale=0.05                # 1 Lego unit in Blender Unit
...

Two ways you can fix this, change your ldraw folder's location to C:\Ldraw or just change the code to what your actual path is.

...
LDrawPath="C:\Program Files\LDraw"      # LDRAW base installation directory
...

when I import stuff from leocad, the anchor point is the same for every brick, and it's often way far away from the model itself.  is there a way to fix that problem?

Just another quick Blender question: Is there any particular increment with which you should bevel the brick, or do you have to do all the beveling manually?  We want the bevels to look the same for every single brick, but we can't seem to do that manually.