Wednesday, 24 July 2019

Unreal Lego

I've been looking at importing LDR files into Unreal Engine 4.  I haven't used Unreal Engine since version 3 so I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to import assets into Unreal Engine in the latest version.  In the past you had to use esoteric .psk files and the like - now you can simply import .fbx files.




The main problem I had was getting the colours in.  Blender does not seem to include the colours when it exports an .fbx file and I couldn't work out how to bake the colours in using Blender - in the end I had to resort to using Maya to export the FBX file.

Wednesday, 3 July 2019

Instructing A Dolphin

I recently offerred to build an set of instructions for a Lego Dolphin that a London AFOL friend had made - the model was faily straightforwards and I'd originally built the initial model in LDCAD.  Previously I've used LPub3D to create instructions but this time I thought I would use Studio 2.0.  Studio is improving all the time and the instruction tools looked pretty good so I thought I would give it a go.  

The Step Editor and page design tools are very intuitive, allowing for straightforwards drag and drop and I was able to create a 50 step instruction set fairly easily to build the dolphin model.  As a first attempt I was fairly pleased with the output, which was easy to export a PDF file.   The only caveat is if you are using flexible parts - whilst Studio is beginning to support flexible parts but not all them currently so for some flexible parts (like PF cables that I used in my Robot Car here) you might still have to use LPub3D.






Saturday, 1 June 2019

OpenSDRAW - Feel The Power!

I've started to look at OpenSDRAW - Its fairly complicated but seems very powerful, allowing you to manipulate libraries of parts and create animations (without having to get stuck into something like Blender).  I rendered a couple of the example animations...



Currently, I don't really know how it all works in detail - but I like what it can do!

Wednesday, 1 May 2019

Flexible Parts in Stud.io (but rubber bands remain elusive!)

The latest version of Stud.io supports 13 flexible parts (including string with stud on ends) but sadly rubber bands aren't available yet, which is a shame as they were an important component in my "Professor Branestawm's Invention For Peeling Potatoes" MOC.



The latest version does though fix the problem I had with "missing bricks" when I used the Stud.io photoreal renderer on models that had been created by my ColouredVoxel2LDR script.  You can see there are quite a few "holes" in the model on the left, but the model on the right has all the bricks present.





Monday, 1 April 2019

www.brickalo.com gets spammed!

It looks like my www.brickalo.com website has been found by some sort of SPAM robot.  I've kept an eye on the backend system which does not appear to have been compromised - any email addresses entered in to Brickalo are not used and the system does not send out any emails (there is no email server installed on the backend).  So it does appear that robots are now playing with Lego!



In the image above, probably 75% of the Rainbow Lego Towers have been built by some kind of spam robot!     

Sunday, 3 March 2019

ColouredVoxel2LDR Code on GitHub - Coloured Voxels Part 6

So I've posted my code and instructions to allow you to create LDraw .ldr files from textured 3D models on GitHub

https://github.com/pennyforge/ColouredVoxels2LDR

This includes a fix to remove (by merging into larger bricks) the spurious 1x1 bricks that could appear on the models (check out Yoshi's nose in the previous post for an example of this problem).

Hope you enjoy it - Let me know how you get on!



Friday, 1 March 2019

Video Game Giants - Coloured Voxels Part 5

Although the conversion of Yoshi to a Lego Model works really well, what I'd realised previously is that there is a problem with the way my code scans the voxel slice as there is a tendency for the code to create lines of 1x1 bricks, when they could clearly be converted into a larger brick shape.  The problem is caused by the fact that my code scans the voxel slice horizontally then vertically on each consecutive layer (as this adds strength to the resulting model), however with coloured voxels it's possible for lines of coloured voxels on the edge of the model - the skin if you like - to be interpreted as a single 1x1 brick on one slice and as a larger brick on a subsequent slice - you can see this quite clearly on Yoshi's nose in the image below.


I wanted to try to remove this 1x1 brick anomaly from the models as it is likely to effect the strength of the model (you can see a column of 1x1 bricks on the left of Yoshi's nose) and it looks unnatural in the build, no one would really use a row of 1x1 bricks when larger bricks are available.  Consequently I was going to need to do a second pass on each voxel layer to try to remove these lines of 1x1 bricks.