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Subject: 
non-lego rendering using various LDraw tools
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dat.ideas
Date: 
Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:06:50 GMT
Viewed: 
4515 times
  
I’ve been messing around with a rendered scene for a music CD-R. I’m really happy with how it turned out, so I thought I’d share it. More on-topic, I used a number of LDraw tools in the creation process.

Rendered CD booklet
cover

Bonus points if you recognize the silhouette. :)

The larger image (click through to see it) is actually a half-size reduction of the full render. You can try viewing the full size image, but GeoCities wasn’t keen on showing it to me. I guess they didn’t like the 4.4Mb filesize?

Anyway, this isn’t the final, printable version; I’ve got to add some non-rendered elements to the image. But this is the final output from POV-Ray, and will form the background of the complete ‘product’.

Some details on the process:

First, all LDraw-to-POV-Ray conversions were done with L3P. :)

To create the black rays, I wrote a short script in Perl to generate LDLite code. Because I needed to use the difference operation to create a cutout of the human figure, I manually modified the L3P-output from plain triangles to very short (.1 tall) triangular prisms.

For the human figure, I scanned the original, then converted it to a black and white BMP.

Originally, I used LDAO’s BMP2DAT function to convert the image to LDraw code, but rendering in POV-Ray was extremely slow. I let POV run for several days, but it never got further than about 38%. The reason for the slowness was the combination of the difference operation with the 900+ boxes in the rasterized figure.

So, I wrote new code in LDAO to build a vectorized version of the image. The new code generates the outline of the image, then uses the Triangle utility to generate the mesh of triangles. Then more code in LDAO converts the Triangle output back to LDraw code. More LDAO code turns the 2D figure into a 3D prism (ie, makes it thick).

The final version of the POV-Ray scene rendered in about 4 hours.

The new code in LDAO isn’t polished enough to publish as a vectorBMP2DAT yet. I’ll work on that, and release it soon.

Steve



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: non-lego rendering using various LDraw tools
 
(...) Hey, that's pretty cool. Did you use the Triangle executable I built? I replaced it with a new build containing the math fix Travis mentioned, but forgot to mention that I did so. I guess whatever you used must've worked though. (...) How does (...) (20 years ago, 23-Sep-04, to lugnet.cad.dat.ideas, FTX)

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