Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Only the sun light works in my scene. I have been using the emission material to get directed lighting, and these only come into effect around 3000 strength.

Like i said in my previous messages, the model are huge. 100 times their real size. You need to keep that in mind when you want to light them.
You can't light the Eiffel Tower with a small lightbulb, it's the same here.

That been said, 3000 is a bit high, can you share a screenshot of your scene and node ?

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vw58brh1w456a3a/AABu4Ltjgf7evntpZ6KJo6hZa?dl😮
I have put a volume scatter but that very slightly effects the light's strength. I've linked a quick render of the scene with two emissive planes coming from the right with 2000 strength

Well, lighting is still a bit of a mystery to me, but i think the trouble you have come from your HDRI who is set really high.
With that powerful of a light, you other lights need to be set really high too to be noticeable. It's like trying to light something only with your phone flashlight on a sunny summer day.

https://i.imgur.com/8lt5k9D.jpg

This is a screenshot from the project I'm working on right now. The scene is lighted with a set of planes with an emission shader and an HDRI.

As you can see, we can barely see the environment texture in the background (I've turned it down a lot, the strength is 0.2, i just use it to give a bit of depth to the light), it's the emission plane who do the heavy lifting.
With only a strength of 8, all of the 6 planes can light up a pretty big scene. The size is key, you need a pretty big surface to have a nice, powerful light.

You can also see that i have a little accent light, the red one, in the middle of the image. In that case I've used a point light, the size is pretty small so i had to ramp up the strength to compensate so i bumped it up to 1000.

Lighting is pretty experimental, nothing is really off-limits. It's really hard the fist few times you try something but with a lot a tweaking, you can manage to get some pretty cool result !

@SaitoGray Do you know of any ways to shrink the models without the materials getting messed up? I'm running into all the Z-fighting issues, its not a big deal with a still frame but is very noticeable when rendering an animation. Thanks!

Thanks SaitoGray, I will experiment with he HDRI and the emission shader and see how it goes.

@snooperking There aren't any easy ways. You will have to open the nodes and add a multiplier (your scale) everywhere it is needed - Subsurface scattering, rounded edges, procedural textures, etc. Z fighting is only on the viewport from what I observed, I doesn't appear at render time with Cycles.

@Scrubs You might improve the addon that the values for SSS, the bevel node etc. are linked to the main locator (Empty) of each imported model to allow scaling of the models.

@Scrubs, do you have any examples? I want to make one master node for scaled down models and then go and retexture all the imported models by modifying it for the individual pieces, I'm doing a large scale animation that uses a few other Lego to Blender plugins as well such as Bricker to do lego Simulations and I need to be able to scale the models down to work with the others.

@snooperking Scaling will affect SSS and the Bevel node (if you replace the old OSL bevel feature with that). You have to use "Driver" in Blender to drive the SSS and Bevel node value by the scaling values.

In this case you will use an empty axis and you need to get through to one of each main materials for solid, transparent etc. to link the values by multiplying them with the scale values. That's all. It would be helpful if SCRUBS will add such a Driver to the root axis of the imported models in his next update to allow scaling imported models without messing up the SSS and bevel size.

Here's a tutorial about "Driver": https://youtu.be/BJJJpWcxp0o

Hi everybody!

I do not know if this has already been proposed but I have an idea for a feature for the Mecabricks script.

For people like me who use groups in the Workshop, it would be nice if, during the export, we can retrieve this information in order to exploit it in Blender. This would make it possible to use the new 2.8 Collections system to keep our groups organized. We could also place Empty at the origin pivots of each group, and parent the parts to these Empty, to facilitate the pose of our models for renders, or for animation. Empties could even be replace by Armatures.

I tried to think of a way to make this feature possible. Apparently, Collada does not allow to store information about groups. So I thought about creating a Python file when exporting the model that could contain a variable in which the tree would be stored. This variable might look something like this:

modelTree = {
	'group_name_1' : {'origin': [x, y, z], 'parent': '', 'childs': ['part.001', 'part.002', 'part.158', ...]},
	'group_name_2' : {'origin': [x, y, z], 'parent': 'group_name_1', 'childs': ['part.003', 'part.004', 'part.075', ...]},
	'group_name_3' : ...
}

Then, this variable could be imported into the Mecabricks script and exploited by a function that would recreate the groups in Blender, and create the Empties (or Armatures).

What do you think (especially Scrubs) ? Is it a good idea ? Is it achievable? Feel free to review.

Thanks.

Hello,

Collada format starts to be very limiting. I already designed another one for other applications.
The only advantage for now is that Collada has a built-in importer in Blender and I would need to write a new one from the ground for my format.
Overall it is a good idea. Probably some things to sort out like origins. Parts have multiple snap/rotation points which are independent from the mesh origins so exporting every single one would be a bit much.

Next step for me will be to update the add-on for 2.80.

Other things came out in the past 6 months with Bricklink and stud.io with their built in Cycles renderer (that they re-branded Eyesight without mentioning Cycles...). I know they acquired my Blender add-on and I found a lot of my work in their product... Good thing is that for now they are mainly programmers and they don't seem to really understand 3D. But from now, I have to think carefully to what I can expose as the python code is not compiled and therefore very easily accessible.

Hi Scrubs,

I understand your reluctance. It's always frustrating to see your work reused by others without your permission and without any sign of recognition.
In the case of Cycles, this is unfortunately not the first time it happens.

Do you plan to update your add-on for beta 2.8? I am not as good a programmer as you, but if you run out of time, I can try to help you.

Yes, I am waiting for 2.80 beta to update the add-on so that the API is closer to final version. I have a number of improvements to add including one to greatly speed the import process.
I saw a tutorial a few month ago that was showing how to update a 2.79 add-on for 2.80 I cannot find it anymore so if anybody has seen this one or something similar I'd take the link.

I don't know if it's what you’re looking for, but i have this one on hand : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjy-zGG3Wk4

Exporting the group is a nice idea, it would be useful on large scale model like the one I'm working on right now, but i found a pretty easy workaround. You can hide everything except your group and export your model one group at a time.
https://imgur.com/a/HTIarm3
It works great and it's a pretty quick "fix". Maybe instead of making a python file you could make an option to export the groups as separates object then add an option in the import script to import a folder instead of a file.
You would need to add yourself the pivot point in Blender for animations but it's a pretty easy thing to do.

That really sucks that they stole your work. It's a real shame... Maybe you can set up a system to give access to an up-to-date script only to people you trust on as a reward in your Patreon ?
I don't really know what you could do, that a shitty situation.

Anyway, i can't wait for Blender 2.8, the render farm is great but i still mainly use the scrip, especially since a use a lot of custom texture and my file gets absolutely huge...

@SaitoGray That is is maybe an option for the groups.
I cannot say that they "stole" it but they have been strongly "inspired" for sure 😛

Anyway, I still want to maintain this add-on which is quite useful even for me! Looking forward to updating it for Blender 2.80

Yes thanks for the link. I think that is the one!

@SaltoGray Yes, I do exactly the same thing. It's quite boring when you have a lot of groups but it works fine.

@Scrubs I don't know if it is part of the improvements you want to add, but there is two little features that I think it would be cool to add.

• Rather than import the collada file, directly import the .zip file and let the script extract its contents.
• And add a feature that allows to import multiple .dae (or .zip) files at the same time.
  I've already test on your script and it works fine. I can send you the few lines of code if you want.

@Helo Yes of course.