LEGO Cable Car in LDCad

[Mark Verbeek]

Hey All,

recently I started browsing trough this forum and concluded that here would an excellent place to tell (and get some feedback) about my project I've been working on. 

So what I try to do is to build a cable car of the model funitel, this is a cable car with one cable looped twice, so each gondola has two cables where it 

I started this project digitally in LDD but soon became I limited by the grouping of parts and making of modules. Since this project has a lot of repetition, modularity is a must. I started with setting modules in separate LDD files be this became cumbersome and created merge issues and so forth. Therefore I converted all files into LDR files with one file for each module, allowing for easy reuse. 

The current status of this project is that it for 80% complete (I guess). There are 18000+ parts used, grouped into 89 unique modules. The use of LDCad allows me to easily swap between files and work quickly between the modules. Also, I (mis-)use the pneumatic hoses as cable to complete the picture. 

my to do list:
- I'm working on getting some animation done, I hope to get everything animated but that will take a while. 
- Finishing the valley station as only a skeleton build now
- Adding an environment, (forest and ski slopes) and some architectural designs.


Finally a render of all described above: 


POV-ray export from LDCad 1.6, I removed the default lighting and added lights as part of an one-stud part I placed on places in the model where I wanted a light.

[Roland Melkert]

Great project, very large scale if you plan to do the whole slope in bricks.

If you need help animating it feel free to ask/mail me.

[Michael Horvath]

How are you going to build the snow and hills? I have in the past used heightfields created in World Machine, as can be seen here.

Also, note that LDCad has precision issues with models that are very big in size. I noticed this when working on the Datsville model. The program draws overlapping surfaces when zooming all the way out. Luckily I think this issue is just cosmetic. The model file itself is not affected AFAIK.

[Mark Verbeek]

How are you going to build the snow and hills? I have in the past used heightfields created in World Machine, as can be seen here.

Also, note that LDCad has precision issues with models that are very big in size. I noticed this when working on the Datsville model. The program draws overlapping surfaces when zooming all the way out. Luckily I think this issue is just cosmetic. The model file itself is not affected AFAIK.

I have some plans for the terrain generation. I experimented with LDcad markers and using a Matlab script to generate the terrain seen in the render. The terrain is now just a collection of triangles. The hard part is to get the scale of the terrain equal to the size of the cable car. I would like to decorate the mountains a bit more, with lego trees, lights and other objects you can find in a skiing area.

[yongxu wang]

Cool