Techniques and Tutorials

[Stan Isachenko]

This topic for Publishing here tutorials for Pov-Ray rendering.
Koyan Tutorial - This is old tutorial may be useful for people, who begin to teach pov-ray.
But there is few problems.
This tutorial is made for L3p 1,3 if you use 1,4 you have manually copy colors definitions from files.
Also we can here share lightprobes and other.

[Willy Tschager]

Hi,

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w.
LDraw Webmaster

[Daniel Goerner]

I'm looking for the ultimate rendering tutorial, because my POV-rendered minifigs look like s**t. The heads are edgy, the arms look like poorly put together from three parts, etc. I don't know if it is the LDraw-part itself, or something wrong with my pov-file. What would I have to do to get a lifelike minifig?

[Tim Gould]

It's the parts themselves. Are you exporting via l3p or LDView? If you try exporting through the latter you'll get some improvement due to cleverness in its mesh export. Not great but definitely better than some versions of l3p.

Tim

[Orion Pobursky]

If you want a little more realism you might give Anton Raves library a try. It's not directly LDraw compatible but a little fiddling will get you there and I think he has a converter.

[Philippe Hurbain]

About the minifig heads, they would probably look better using a blank head (only primitives -> perfect shape) and use a texture map for pattern...

[Daniel Goerner]

About the minifig heads, they would probably look better using a blank head (only primitives -> perfect shape) and use a texture map for pattern...

I don't know what that means, but it sounds like something you can't do in LDraw. So, my question is (although it's going off topic), what can we do to get better LDraw parts? Like round, patterned heads and arms that look like one piece.

[Orion Pobursky]

This is probably one of the most glaring limitations of the LDraw format. Fixing it properly (e.g. Adding mesh or image map support) would most likely break backwards compatibility in a major way.

[Philippe Hurbain]

Maybe not: http://news.lugnet.com/cad/dat/parts/?n=6523

[Travis Cobbs]

I hope to bring this up with the LSC soon (for real this time). I just need to get the proposed spec into the LSC scratch pad page on ldraw.org (which will take a while).

[Daniel Goerner]

Maybe not: http://news.lugnet.com/cad/dat/parts/?n=6523

So, if I get the article right, it's messed up bump maps that let Qui-Gon look as if he's wearing a crown on his forehead and has grapes up his cheeks? I made this new head and I'm still trying to figure out how to place the yellow triangles to avoid this.

[Travis Cobbs]

No, it's not bumps, but rather the LDraw to POV converter's inability to smooth the geometry of minifig faces. If you use LDView to export to POV, its smoothing just doesn't work right on the faces. (L3P doesn't perform smoothing of mesh data, only curved primitives, so its output isn't any better.)

However, if the faces were modeled as textures over a blank face, the smoothing would work. The next version of LDView will support the textures, but probably not in its POV export. I'll likely only do the work for POV export support of textures if the LSC ratifies them.

[Oh-Seong KWON]

Hi

I found a useful link for rendering techniques.

http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.ph...opic=65876

Enjoy

[Travis Cobbs]

If someone would put me in contact with C3POwen from the linked Eurobricks post, I'll investigate including his LGEO.xml in the next LDView release.

[Travis Cobbs]

Never mind; I registered on Eurobricks and asked in the thread.