Interesting BrickNerd article about Eyesight

[Orion Pobursky]

While researching for another thread, I stumbled upon and interesting article about "Hacking" Eyesight in Studio:
https://bricknerd.com/home/hacking-studi...r-11-28-23

That said, since Eyesight is just a Cycles fork, I'd be curious to know exactly what need to be done to just use Cycles directly.  There's probably some color/material properties/textures that need to be supplied. If an individual or team wants to work on something, I'd be happy to create an official git repo to house the code/presets.

[N. W. Perry]

That looks incredibly informative, I have to go through that in more depth! I can't code worth a nickel, but I'm dangerous enough to hack my way through a command line like this…

[Roland Melkert]

That said, since Eyesight is just a Cycles fork, I'd be curious to know exactly what need to be done to just use Cycles directly.  There's probably some color/material properties/textures that need to be supplied. If an individual or team wants to work on something, I'd be happy to create an official git repo to house the code/presets.

Some years back I did look into it for a LDCad export feature, but couldn't find any useful information. 

In the end I settled for a indirect blender export using the glTF format

It might be time to revisit that.

[Orion Pobursky]

That said, since Eyesight is just a Cycles fork, I'd be curious to know exactly what need to be done to just use Cycles directly.  There's probably some color/material properties/textures that need to be supplied. If an individual or team wants to work on something, I'd be happy to create an official git repo to house the code/presets.

Based on feedback from Sylvan in another thread, since the Cycles fork Eyesight is based on is almost a decade old and poorly documented, it would be far better to just go the current Cycles/Blender route.  This will likely require the same style work on color/material properties/textures definitions.  My offer to create an official LDraw repo still stands.

[Sylvain Sauvage]

I think what’s great with Studio is the simple interface to start renders.

The problems with Blender and its plugins are that:
1. You need to install the plugins.
2. You need to know how to use Blender, to add lights and background and whatnot.
3. That takes a lot of time and RAM (compared to the time and RAM taken by the same model with Studio » Eyesight)¹.

The most user-friendly solution would be to be able to prepare and export a full scene, ready to render.  Then, if you can start the render directly from the CAD, it’s just a plus.

———
¹ Maybe it’s because I don’t know Blender and the plugins enough and used the wrong parameters (though I think I used the smallest ones).

[N. W. Perry]

I think what’s great with Studio is the simple interface to start renders.

The problems with Blender and its plugins are that:
1. You need to install the plugins.
2. You need to know how to use Blender, to add lights and background and whatnot.
3. That takes a lot of time and RAM (compared to the time and RAM taken by the same model with Studio » Eyesight).

This is my take as well. Although I could eventually figure out how to get satisfactory results with Blender, I get very good ones right away with Eyesight's interface and feature set. The biggest drawback is simply Studio's incompatibility with the library, but the extra workflow involved in that is comparable to that involved with working directly in Blender/Cycles.

Those who already use Blender regularly would probably feel differently. But I already use enough specialty software in my work that I don't have time to learn too many other programs for my hobby…