Renderred Ldraw models for movie backgrounds

[Dorian Jarosz]

Hello

I make stop-motion movies with Lego and I need make backgrounds for my movies. Lego models will be renderred with Ldraw, Pov-Ray (maybe) and Vue (professional graphics programm to create photorealistic landscapes). I need render photorealistic Lego models in the backgrounds, too, because backgrounds in my movies and Lego models on them must be identic as real Lego bricks on the movie set.

So I would like to ask you, if I can convert Ldraw models to Pov-ray (with LGeo library of course) and then convert from Pov-ray to Vue (wich supports standard graphics objects format like .3ds, .obj etc.) to achieve photorealistic models on landscapes in the background. Or can I just directly convert Ldraw models to Vue to have photorealistic models, too?

Thanks in advance

[Willy Tschager]

I used Bryce for the backgrounds of these wallpapers. At the time I converted to Lightwave which could be imported in Bryce. I cannot see any benefit converting to Pov as path-trough.

w.

[Travis Cobbs]

If you can find a way to convert the LGEO-enabled POV models into a format you can get in Vue, that would likely produce that best quality, since the LGEO models of the bricks have higher detail. However, I'm not sure you're going to be able to find a way to do that, as the POV format is extraordinarily complicated, and normally things are modeled in another format and then converted to POV format.

LDView supports export to 3DS format, but there are a few problems. First of all, its computed smooth normals don't make it into the export, so you end up with a faceted model. Secondly, the released (even Beta) LDView has serious bugs in the 3DS export functionality. However, if you want to give it a try despite the faceting (which you may have some other way to deal with), contact the LDView email address, and I'll send you a developer build, which has many bug fixes in the 3DS output.