MixedMocs

Awesome! My first contribution to a public Github project, lol. Glad I could help you out! If you have anything else I could take a look at, feel free to ask. I have a bunch of free time now till next semester starts!

Hi! Do you still want to add the new parts to LDD, or are you using Studio now?

Hi there! I have a small parts request: Could you add the standard minifigure hand & arm with hand as single pieces, just with a clip connection for the hand? I see them used a lot as parts by themselves, for example in bionicle mocs: you can use either one as fingers or finger tips for better looking big hands, or as spines, e.g. on insect legs. For example, here's the "Roach Plague Mech" by Thomas Jenkins on Flickr, which uses both parts heavily: You can see how the aforementioned minifig parts contribute a lot of details to this build, in the mandibles, hands, ribs and spines. As you know, it isn't currently possible to get the hands by themselves in LDD (just the completed torso pieces), and changing that would open up all of these possibilities for digital moc builders like myself! It might even be easy to extract the models just from the existing minifigure torso, but I haven't tried it. Whether you add them or not, thank you for your work! Your added parts are an absolute blessing for anyone using LDD.

Hi @M2m! Sorry for the long radio silence, uni always gets in the way of the important things in life lol. Anyways, since my last post, I added support for ray tracing transparent materials and created a pull request on your github repository. Wanted to let you know here as well so you know who it's from. Quick low-res Screengrab showcasing the metallic & transparent parts:

Are you kidding? I love the plugin! LDD has always been my preferred method for digital lego (Studio has improved, but the way it sorts its parts confuses me, plus it seems to freee up if I ever hit the "stability" tool on accident) and I love using Blender for my renders because of its versatility, so your plugin is pretty much perfect for me! I'll see about the pull request; I've never really interacted with github beyond finding the download button, lol. I've also figured out the metallic colors in the meantime, I'm doing the naive method where I'm basically just checking the color ID against a list of all the metal colors and then changing the material accordingly: Notice how all the former "yellow" pieces are nice and golden now, as intended. I might add in a little more roughness or dial back the metallic value so it looks less like actual metal; the material now was kind of inspired by this post by Cezium on Instagram.

"Fan made" modification to the plugin: I made a little modification to how the plugin creates materials. This allows for adding a glossy effect which closer resembles Lego plastic IRL, in my opinion. I'm appending some before and after shots below (I read the beginner post an understand now that I'm supposed to embed links, lol). Technobabbel as to how it works: I changed the code to use the nodetrees instead of just setting the diffuse material colors. I use the "Principled BDSF" shader and set the roughness to 0.1, which makes the material glossy (without making in mirror-like), even in the cycles renderer (only editing the diffuse material directly will change how it shows up in the viewport/eevee, but not in the final cycles render itself). I keep the same colors you set. Code Modification: material.roughness = 0.1 material.use_nodes = True material.node_tree.nodes["Principled BSDF"].inputs[0].default_value = (self.r, self.g, self.b, self.a) material.node_tree.nodes["Principled BSDF"].inputs[2].default_value = 0.1 Paste this at line 765 of the file importldd.py inside your Blender's scripts directory (the folder C:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons). You can just open the file with Editor; it's what I did. The lines just before where you paste it should read: material = bpy.data.materials.new(matId_or_decId) material.diffuse_color = (self.r, self.g, self.b, self.a) If you do that and indent everything so that it matches the two lines above, it should now work after reloading your scripts. That is, assuming you didn't mess up capitalization (yes, python cares about that) or add any spacebars/tabs anywhere (yes, python cares about that as well). You should now notice that your bricks are a lot more glossy the next time you import anything. Example images: Before: After: Notice how the bricks now catch the light and reflect each other a lot better, whereas they just looked dull before. Further suggestions and notes: This might not work for parts with decorations. I didn't test those because I couldn't get decorated parts to import correctly in the first place, with or without my mod, lol. This also does not change any existing blender saves where you have already imported something; those bricks will stay matte, but anything you import from now on will be glossy. This is mostly a proof of concept; individuals with more energy than me can now come along and add any number of fun properties to the materials (maybe even the "used brick" look with the little nooks and scratches that Studio does, just using a shader / normal map?) You could also now try detecting when a color is supposed to be metallic, and then making it so. I currently don't have any motivation to do that, though. My approach would just be a big if-statement with all the metal colors. I suppose the "right approach" would be to store the ldd name of each color in an excel table, then the settings needed to recreate it in the columns next to the name, and then somehow make python read all that. I don't know how to do that; this was my first dabble with python. Also, technically, some lego bricks will be annoying because they're shiny on some surfaces but rough on others - c.f. part 303921 "roof tile". I think worrying about that is just my perfectionism rearing its ugly head, though. In conclusion: @M2m Feel free to add my modification to your base version of the script, if you so desire. You can credit me just in a comment next to the part I contributed. If you want to discuss any of this further, feel free to dm me. Preferably with an email adress we can use, cause I still have like 4 posts left to go until I can actually dm anybody, lol. So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I'm not seeing any use of stud.io or any animations on the channel you link to? Did you maybe copy the wrong link or is this just spam?

I know I'm probably late, apologies for that. I only joined these forums yesterday! I'll try to help you out if you still have a problem, but I need a bit of info for that: Could you provide the .lxf file (the model your kid made) that isn't working? What about other .lxf files, do those work still? Did you modify your version of LDD at all?

I don't think LDD actually supports changing the controls natively (as in, the controls are probably hard-coded into the .exe, so someone would need to decode that first). Maybe someone who knows more about the technical details can come along, but for now, it's probably easiest to get used to [shift]-[right click]-dragging to move around LDD. You're gonna need the hotkeys anyways, I promise! (w, a and s for rotating parts, d for deleting them). Big fan of your work on Insta, by the way, I love the darker style!

Apparently, the "Pink Bricks Bug" was just an artifact from the fact that i made those files before installing the new bricks - If anyone else is having the same issue: changing anything about your file and then saving it (in your new version) fixed it for me. Apparently the old files have to be "reconciled" with your modified LDD at least once to be translated properly. Weird edge case, but not a problem!

Hello! First of all, THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS! I've been searching for days for a way to finally render my LDD mocs with the modded parts, and your plugin (mostly) works like an absolute charm for that! Compared to bluerender, which doesn't accept the new lif file that LIFCreator gives me, or importing into Stud.io, which rotates half the pieces wrong, your plugin is definitely the best option for me right now. That being said, I have been getting a few smaller issues with some of my complex models. First of all, it seems that the plugin doesn't like decorated bricks a lot. When I try to import something with a brick that has a print on it, i get the following error: Python: Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\[my name]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\importldd.py", line 1454, in execute return convertldd_data(context, self.filepath, self.lddLIFPath, self.useLogoStuds, self.useLDDCamera) File "C:\Users\[my name]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\importldd.py", line 1394, in convertldd_data converter.Export(filename=filepath, useLogoStuds=useLogoStuds, useLDDCamera=useLDDCamera) File "C:\Users\[my name]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\importldd.py", line 1144, in Export texImage.image = bpy.data.images.load(os.path.normpath(decofilename)) RuntimeError: Error: Cannot read '\Decorations\101321.png': No such file or directory It will then stop importing, so I'll have only half a model or nothing at all in blender. If I go back into LDD and remove the decoration from the part, the model is imported without issue. Apparently it just can't find the decoration files, I've tried it with both the new and old decorations, same issue. Second of all, on some models, some brick faces will show up pink when imported. I'll attach a screenshot. I have no idea why this happens, but at least it seems to be constistent per brick: the sand-yellow 1x1 bricks in the screenshot all consistently have 3 pink faces (some of them are just rotated apparently). The import doesn't throw any errors for this issue. I'm sorry about the shoddy screenshot compression. I would love to attach more screenshots, but I'm only allowed a max total size of 0.1mb, which isn't enough for much of anything if we're honest (does this get better if I post more? This is my first forum contribution after all). I can also send you some of my "incriminating" model files if you want, just tell me through which channel you'd like to receive them. Be aware that I do use the new modded LDD parts from the key topic on here, though I think I can also find some with just the "vanilla" parts.