I think you are totally wrong but I respect your opinion. I spent 5 years WORKING FOR FREE on Mecabricks. I spend probably as much time working on Mecabricks as I do for my everyday job. I spent hundreds of dollars to host the website. I spent thousands of dollars to buy sets and design the 3d models of pieces that were requested in the forum by people I don't even know. So you imagine that it is not the couple of hundred bucks I got over 3 years that will pay for anything. The contest I made last year had one prize which I bought and sent with my own money. Do you want me to keep going on with what I spent for the website without getting back anything in return?

I do it because I like it and because I met great people sharing the same hobby. I don't have a money tree in my backyard and I start to reach the bottom of my pockets. When I spend weeks working on a side project like the minifig which I did not intend to give away originally, I think that it is a good idea to help keep Mecabricks alive.

Would you accept to work for free yourself? Probably not as everybody needs to eat. But for whatever reason people think that what is made on the internet shall always be free. Everybody is fed up nowadays with advertising on websites and the day I provide a different approach without forcing anybody, it is still not good?

Getting funds with side project is on the contrary of what you think a solution to keep the Mecabricks workshop free. This is what I want: a free solution for people to enjoy digital LEGO building. So yes, I will try things on the side in order to keep it this way.

Sad to see you go but for people willing to stay, there will be a lot more fun coming in the future.

I know what you're talking about and if it's really something I love to do, then it would be for free.

As of I see things today, it looks to me that the shop is going to become an important part of Mecabricks. It's among the headers between workshop, library, parts and forum. The new tab 'Purchases' is making me have questions. ** Anyway it's good to know you're not planning to make anything in the workshop requires money or purchases. ** I've been here for 4 years now too, and I contributed as much as I can. It would be a shame if it's going to die.

As the one who brought the idea for rendering MB data I have to give my statement here.

@ Sim. You might have some valid points to discuss but I please keep the communication kind and less offensive because what Scubs gave us for free is unique in the LEGO world on this planet. Most people are used to get virtual things for free these days. I am coming from a generation where nothing was for free before the internet. Therefore I have a different point of view to this.

The ressources of playing with digital LEGO are extremely limited. We have LDRAW, LDD and finally MECABRICKS. I have done a lot of research the last years to find a proper and efficient way to render LEGO and failed everytime. Finally I got success in 2014 with a BLENDER script to import LDRAW but bigger models gave me a headache. Then I found MECABRICKS and got in touch with Scrubs to pass him ideas for rendering his beautiful work. I gave my MODO setup to Scrubs to create a BLENDER template for free. He implemented all ideas and I have now a fantastic workflow to import LEGO in minutes and not hours. I am extremely happy and found a new passion: rendering LEGO.

I am a professional 3D animator running his own business for 20 years now. I have a good insight what programming means because I am paying people for this. What Scrubs is doing is fantastic. He's spending his sparetime for his hobby. He's sharing his work for free. As long as it's free we should honor this. No matter how many ads are on his homepage. No matter if theres's a big donate button. These ads and the button are a valid way to pay him for his work. And he deserves this. I don't care about the ads because they don't hold me back from working with MECABRICKS or just enjoying the work and renderings of all users.

Everyone who feels annoyed or harassed by this should really be fair not to complain and stop using MECABRICKS. It's really not hard to ignore the ads and it's up to you to use the donate button. But to complain to Scrubs about this while using his work for free looks to me selfish and rediculous.

Scrubs won't and can't make a direct business with MB because he's aware that all rebuild parts, decorations and especially the Minifigs are proprietary of the LEGO Group. LEGO is tolerating such a non-profit business and many other fan based projects because these people are finally their customers and it's advertisement for free. But running ads or a donate button is not a direct business nor Scrubs is making profit with that. It's a fair compensation for the huge amount of time and energy he's spending on this project for years now ... to give it to you for free. And if this would be easy we would have hundreds of LEGO editors on this planet. But we don't have. We have just a few horrible to use by LDRAW, we have LDD with low-res parts and no option to export and we have the best editor called MECABRICKS.

Once you have understood this you should be very happy to use MECABRICKS and give a sh*t on ads or ... well, not on the donate button 😉

Peace and Play! 😃

P.S.: I love my profession since 1992 but I am not doing it for free. Just saying.

I have decided to rephrase my initial post a little bit to sound nicer. I didn't want to sound offensive, but just wanted to state an opinion. I'm also not complaining, just questioning whether the plan is to integrate the shop further in the website.
Still my opinion remains that the 'money' part shouldn't be all over the place. I'll be looking forward to more comments/opinions. 😃

Thanks for reading my post.

My opinion is: Scrubs' work is impressive for a one man project. He spent hundreds of hours to share it with us. As long as I don't have to close pop-ups every minute interrupting my workflow and fun with MB he can fill up the page with ads if this will make him happy. Just take a look at Minecraft. Notch spent a lot of time on this and people were willing to pay EUR 4,99 for the Alpha, then 9,99 > 14.99 and finally 19,99. He made since 2009 constantly 100K turnover per 24 hours. I guess he made over 180mil plus merchandising. Finally he sold it to MS for 2,5bil. This is insane but he deserved it because he invented something unique. Why should he give it away for free and get annoyed by so many people complaining about this and that finally? The worst and painful "customers" are the ones not paying for something. Believe me.

Scrubs can't sell his website this way. If he would make a successful business with a subscription model he would definitely get in trouble with the LEGO Group. But as long as he earns some money from ads or donations it's fair. And if he would get rich by ads it's more than fair because we all would benefit from this. He would maybe quit his job and focus on MB only and it would become more and more powerful and awesome. Still without paying a cent for it.

If he starts a shop for selling special stuff it's up to the users to buy it or not. He's not forcing you to buy it. He's not selling the Minifig itself. He's selling the hours he spent on it and he's giving away some ideas and "secrets" everyone will adapt in a few hours, days or weeks. If you don't like it just model your own hi-res model with nice textures.

That's the pro and con with sharing. When I worked out my MODO setup over weeks to make the renderings look better and better I got many messages if I mind to share it. I did not because I realized that I had found something rare and unique. I got also some inquiries to render MOCs for money. As I said: the methods of rendering LEGO are extremely limited. You can use POV-Ray. It's slow and not really flexible. You can use Bluerender to render LDD. But the best way is to use a 3d application. The LEGO Group has for a long time a digital department. They have many suppliers for animation and games. They have advertisement agencies and film- and post-productions for commercials and last but not least they have Animal Logic doing animated feature films on a new level of realism. But that's it. Rendering LEGO the professional way was not available for the community since 2015.

I realized that I was the only one with a proper basic workflow to import and render LEGO data in a short time on a quality level between the LEGO Group suppliers and Animal Logic. This has potential to get into business with LEGO. If I share my work too early I get overrun the crowd in weeks and everyone thinks it's totally easy and nothing special to render or animate LEGO. It's not selfish to keep the secrets. It's a plan to be the first and later it's no problem to share.

But finally I gave it to Scrubs because he gave MB to me. This is a fair deal. Now the BLENDER template is so close to my MODO setup. If you are good with BLENDER you will not really see big differences. Rendering LEGO has now been unlocked for the community. We have more and more users rendering really cool stuff. I even had a chat with a guy who said to me: "Nothing special to render LEGO. There's a website called MECABRICKS." But ... but ... meh .. WTF! cry

You know what I mean?

Now the plastic-ball is rolling for a chain reaction and can't be stopped anymore. People who asked me to render for them are doing it on their own. BLENDER is for free. The template is for free. Scrubs' tutorial is for free. Everything is for free. I hope that I find the time to apply to LEGO with my company before someone much younger with more time is doing it and my work looks not really special anymore. Welcome to 2016.

Well, internet happens. Sharing knowledge is good. Our age is a revolution in communication and sending data around the planet. But people have to make money to pay the bills. Coca Cola is still not sharing their secret recipe. All big companies are not sharing their stuff. LEGO is also not giving their products away for free. We should keep all this in mind to share carefully and if you have found something with potential to make money you would be stupid to give it away.

From this point of view we should understand what a great gift MECABRICKS is and that helping Scrubs to update the bricks and decorations has to be done voluntary and finally we all will benefit from it.

Greetings from Germany. 😉

Hello all,

to be honest I do not feel offensed at all by the means implemented by Scrubs to get a bit of money back. As for me I do not have much interest by the materials in the shop but mecabricks is among the 3 sites I disabled my adblock on for several reasons : no pop-up, one ad only per page and most important : no ad on the workshop ! I refresh (very) often the home page and the new parts pages : honestly the ads here are really no problem.

Now for me the best I can do in my available time is to keep on modeling (which I really enjoy) and give a try to help creating decorated parts as I began to do. I began modeling / rendering for years now with ldraw and povray and I never was able to achieve results as I can now do in a few months trainig here, so I can only thank everybody here for provifing us with such a great site.

Regards from France and good night 😉

Hi. I cannot agree more with Rendebricks last post.

I don't want to talk too much about the ad thing. I try to keep them not too visible and annoying. Besides as mathieub noted, I don't put any in the workshop and I refuse to do so even if it is the most seen page of Mecabricks. Being on the editor side, I know the work it involves and I don't use any ad blockers. If I don't like a website, I don't go. I know not everybody thinks like I do, and I don't force people to disable the blockers.

The shop is intented to be a part of Mecabricks but without overtaking it. I want to use it as a place to share digital lego related resources which means that free stuff have a place there too. For instance, I will move the Blender script on the platform to give it more visibility with a huge price of $0. When you checkout a cart with free items, it skips the payment step and you get the files available for download straight in your private MB space.

Don't freak out people, what is currently free on Mecabricks will remain this way 😉
This is what drives me to get a few pay stuff on the side for whoever wants to help, so that everybody can enjoy the rest for free.

I personally don't mind there being a shop on Mecabricks. Scrubs gives us a great deal of his time to improve the workshop and add new parts at a rate which LDD and LDRAW can never match, and he puts the time in to keep the parts as accurate as possible, for example look at the hand of an LDraw minifigure and compare it to the scrubs already gives us for free. As for a donate button of relatively small size that only shows up on one page, I don't see that as a problem.

As for the shop itself, while I'll probably never buy the high-res minifig, since I don't feel I have the time to truly utilize it or a computer to render scenes with it in reasonable amounts of time, I still think It's a great thing for those who can use it!

(And enjoy your ad revenue, those russian girls are watching me) 😃

At least, having this type of conversation here that I've seen on so many websites that I go to means that Mecabricks is not so small anymore and that people give a sh** about it 😉

@Umbramanis And this is totally fine. I don't expect that everybody who comes to MB buys something or gives something. Especially if you are not interested in. When you go to the movie, you have the option to buy some pop corn, drinks, etc, but you are not obliged to. You also have ads before the movie starts. It is the same on Mecabricks. You come, have a couple of quite ads on a few pages before reaching the workshop and then you can start building. Then if you want to go a bit further, you have the options to get some side products that might not all be free. The only difference is that the movie (workshop) here is free.

Not too sure which part of the internet you are browsing before coming on Mecabricks lol It actually happened to me at some stage too. I have shown it to my wife who had a laugh while asking what the f** I was doing with my website.

It has already been said by mostly all the people above but I'm also of the opinion that what Scrubs offers us for free already is just amazing! I personally had my AdBlock turned on for this website but this thread changed my mind. From now on I'll turn it off even if that means I get those weird hair-loss ads. 😉

I hadn't even noticed there were ads. I didn't use Mecabricks before they were implemented, of course, so perhaps I'm just ad-blind...

I completely understand why MB has ads. If you want a website that puts up ads for greed alone, let's talk about YouTube... I've started seeing ads in the middle of videos now. That's insane!

/$0.02

Mecabricks is also one of the sites I disabled my adblocker on. I can't imagine the amount of work that Scrubs must've put into Mecabricks and to imagine that all this work was mostly done by one person is insane. O_o Mecabricks is a good example of how ads should work on the internet anyway. Ads here aren't intrusive or distracting and they integrate with the rest of the site well while still obviously being ads. Well done. 😄

Mecabricks is also one of the sites I disabled my adblocker on. I can't imagine the amount of work that Scrubs must've put into Mecabricks and to imagine that all this work was mostly done by one person is insane. O_o Mecabricks is a good example of how ads should work on the internet anyway. Ads here aren't intrusive or distracting and they integrate with the rest of the site well while still obviously being ads. Well done. 😄

Completely deserved. I personally see no problem if Scrubs adds more ads to get a proper payback for what he gave us for free. Everyone who's not understanding this is just an idiot and should sign-out here. 😃

hey mathieub, hey sim, hey scrubs I saw you were all doing a conversation I would like to join this conversation too!

So, what are all you guys talking about?😄

oh yeah, 😌 I understand what you guys are talking about now, and user JD430w is totally right too, even I didn't notice those ads also.
The only thing I noticed was the donate button, nothing else plus I give a thumbs up 👍 for scrubs, for his hard work camouflaging all the ads on mecabricks 😃 (and the hundred dollars he invested 😆)

I've not been here long... but I've worked on my own projects before, and I completely appreciate the sheer amount of effort involved, even if it is for love. Ads are fine. It's a trade-off anyone with an ounce of sense can understand. Hell, I'd be happy to pay a yearly subscription fee if it turned out I was using MB on a regular basis.

Ads are the only legal way for Scrubs to compensate a part of the effort to develop Mecabricks. He can't switch to a subscription model because it has to be a non-profit fan project what is tolerated by TLG.

Ah! Shame.

EDIT: I've just been wondering how Scrubs is able to sell the hi-res minifig model. Doesn't that also break the non-profit fan project scenario?

EDIT: Anyway, not trying to propose a subscription model... my point was that I fully appreciate the amount of work involved, and (if a sub model was legal) would be happy to pay a yearly fee if I used MB on a regular basis.

He can't switch to a subscription model because it has to be a non-profit fan project what is tolerated by TLG.
Not that simple actually.

If we would follow this reasoning, bricklink.com could not exists, people could not sell MOCs or custom instructions, monthly box subscription would not be there as well as companies renting sets, etc. Which is not the case. It is possible to create businesses focused on our beloved LEGO brick.

The logo, most bricks as well as the official set configurations are trademarks of TLG. From there, if you don't mold and sell those pieces in a branded LEGO box, there are definitely things that you can do.

Mecabricks software does not belong to TLG and is not branded with any LEGO logo or other elements that could confuse the customer. This is what the TLG Fair Play is mainly about. For instance, until the development of sr3d builder was stopped (owner passed away), there was a free version of the software as well as a pay advanced version including more tools and features.

I don't have plans to make anything like that for the workshop app but I thought I could clarify a few points.