How to apply custom decals on LDD renders

[Miro78]

On 6/12/2014 at 12:34 AM, BEAVeR said:

I also have made decals for the rebel trooper and pilot. they can be found on the same page. Here's what it looks like:

Another tip when making colored decorations: It seems like the decorations in the render always turn out darker, so you should anticipate by going for lighter colors in your deocrations.

Thank you for making the Rebel Trooper decorations. I don't use POV-RAY program, but I have found this to work on BlueRender, which I understand came out after this post was posted, but for those now looking for applying custom decorations through LDD and BlueRender, here are the steps I found to work and summarized by me below as a reference to others and myself shall I forget how to do it in a year. :P

Step 1) Obtain custom decoration(s) such as the ones I will use in this example (courtesy of BEAVeR). Copy them (they will be PNG files) into the same directory where your LDD file resides. In my case they will be rebel_trooper_face.png and rebel_trooper_torso.png and the folder is LDD (in my example).

Step 2) To apply the rebel trooper decorations, one must know the decoration IDs of the stand-in figure. Make sure you used a decorated face and torso (in this case) that you want to overwrite with these new decorations. Note that all figures with this "stand-in" decoration will be changed in the rendering, so you can't use the same decoration if you want to keep it unchanged in other figures. Not to worry, LDD has plenty of decorated torsos and faces to pick from. They can be whatever base color as you can change that in the LDD Extended view. Here is the figure I made with "stand-in" head and torso printing. Make sure to change the colors of arms, torso, hands as necessary for the final desired figure. For this Rebel Trooper, I found that Medium Azure arms matches the torso print better than Sand Blue. Not perfect match to actual, but it makes the right difference in the final render output.

Step 3) Now the tricky part of finding out the Decoration ID (aka Texture in Bluerender). This is not listed anywhere without digging into LDD database files, but there is a rather simple way and here are the steps on how. Create a new LDD file with this figure with the "stand-in" head and torso, and proceed to render that file in BlueRender as usual. Then in the BlueRender script output window, look up the Texture ID. So as an example, here I am rendering my LDD Rebel Trooper A.lxf (imaged above from LDD) and the second image below you will see the Texture IDs. The Torso (called Upper Part) Texture ID is 92100 and the Head Texture ID is 55125. You will need to write those down as you will need it in the next step. The third image shows what the render looks like before changing the face and torso decorations.

Step 4) Now that we know the Decoration (Texture) IDs, now we need to edit the BlueRender Scene file (extension .sc). If you don't have one. You can download it via this link.Scene file: https://bricksafe.com/files/miro/ldd-decorations-changes/LDD Rebel Trooper B.sc

It's also important to save this Scene file to the same folder where your LDD file and your new decorations PNG files are located. Make sure the scene file is named exactly the same as your LDD file. In this example, they are named LDD Rebel Trooper B.lxf and LDD Rebel Trooper B.sc. Now open the scene file in a text editing program (Notepad on PCs or Textedit on Mac) and add these lines of code with appropriate path (depending on where you stored LDD and scene files). Below is what is looks like for me (I use a Mac so it will look different on PC and even on your Mac). I think the slashes need to be slanted the other way on PC (please correct me if I am wrong).

##CHANGEDECOR 92100 /Users/yourname/Desktop/Miro/MOCs/LDD/rebel_trooper_torso.png

##CHANGEDECOR 55125 /Users/yourname/Desktop/Miro/MOCs/LDD/rebel_trooper_face.png

Here is how it looks when entering them in your scene file. Exact location may not be critical, but I entered them above the LIGHTS section. Enter as many decoration changes one after another, in this example it's just two (face and torso). Save the file.
 

 

Step 5) Now it's time to render it in BlueRender once again. You will notice that it used the custom scene file as shown in the 2nd line, and the second image now shows what it looks like rendered with correct decorations. The 3rd image is a Tantive IV scene I rendered with a few of these Troopers awaiting Stormtroopers and Darth Vader.

I hope this tutorial helps and is clear enough to follow. Let me know if you have any further questions or comments and I will do my best to clarify things. I am not taking the credit for figuring this out, just consolidating information that took some digging around on this Forum and the web.

 

Edited October 28, 2018 by Miro78