Using Blender to rendering LDraw model

[Oh-Seong KWON]

Hi,

I found a program named Blender today and it's free like POV-RAY.

It looks like having very powerful rendering and animation capability.

Here are the homepage that can download the program, and

little bit old version tutorial, and a video tutorials.

Is there anybody who have used this program to render LDraw model?

I saw the video tutorial part 2 and he recommend to use LeoCAD to convert model to 3DS format, but

then it should drop by v2.49 of Blender for latest version Blender because of unknown reason.

If I would use LDview to export 3DS file, the latest version of Blender could read my model correctly?

In case the model contain only one simple brick, Blender can read, but when I convert my another model 21005 fallingwater,

Blender didn't answer, just showing sandglass.

I have no idea and newbie using Blender, and any comment will be very helpful.

Thanks for reading.

KWON

[Orion Pobursky]

Once, oh so long ago (2004), there was a converter. I even met the lead developer of Blender, Ton, at a conference. Climbing into the LDraw time machine (i.e. my extensive link archive), it looks as if the website for the converter is now defunct. It doesn't really matter anyway since Blender has evolved quite a bit in the last 7 years while that script probably hasn't been touched.

[Orion Pobursky]

Try this site:
https://sites.google.com/site/impiaaa/bl...awimporter

This one's a little older:
http://web.tiscali.it/ALV/blender/

Here's an interesting tutorial:
http://www.bricksinmotion.com/forums/top...nd-tricks/

[Travis Cobbs]

I've heard that Blender can read the 3DS files produced by LDView, but it takes a long time to do so (possibly hours for a large model, while appearing locked up the whole time). I successfully imported the car.dat sample model a while back, but even that took a while, and that's a very small model. Also, since the files LDView produces include the original hierarchy from the LDraw files, they are difficult to manipulate, because the parts themselves are broken up into multiple sub-objects (one for each primitive).