@3DKiwi Maybe try selecting the individual transparent bricks and adjusting the wear values on the objects' materials itself would work?

Ah, Hadn't even looked at the material. Thanks, I'll check it out.

HI everybody! Just wondering if anyone has a suggestion for making the bricks higher poly when using them in blender. I know about the high res mini figure and that's great but the bricks and minifig accessories are low poly and look bad close up. I've tried subdividing and cleaning up the geometry but the subdivision makes rips and undesired creases.

Thanks!

Re higher detail / smoothing. I would use a subdivision modifier and then weight edges to make them sharp apart from the ones where you want it to be rounded / smooth.

Off topic. Hence the reason I model my own parts in Modo where I model at a higher resolution than Mecabricks and LDraw parts. That said, going forward I might combine models created in Mecabricks with a few parts swapped out for ones modelled by me.

Is there a way to change the transparency on the transparent shaders? I want to make them emmissive but it seems to make the objects appear more opaque.

What i did for glowing parts was I put a sphere inside the transparent part, then made the sphere have an emmisive shader. This made it look more like putting an LED inside a real transparent part. Not sure if that's what your going for though

@Owenator13 yes this is how it shall be done. Having this volume emission shader is a quick and dirty way but it remains a hack.

cool, I will try that trick, Thanks

I've been using this for a few weeks now, I've submitted one lego ideas project presented using this and the blender renderer. I plan to do more in future. At the moment my biggest issue is render speed and artifacts, artifacts is not really your issue though.

You may already do this but I was curious to know if any duplicate bricks in mecabricks are exported to blender as instances to decrease memory usage and improve render times?

@WetWired Yes, most tricks in the book are used when you import your model with my add-on in order to optimise memory usage and build time.

Awesome, Thanks.

I'm considering upgrading my GPU to speed up render times/use more samples but I'm not sure if my CPU is good enough to bother. I have an i7-4820k 3.7Ghz 8 Core with an Nvidia 970.

I was considering an Nvidia 1660ti or RTX 2060, I already use CUDA and was hoping this would speed up my workflow, anyone with more technical knowledge than me have any idea whether it's worth upgrading or is my CPU the bottleneck?

No, your CPU is good. Mine only has 2 cores and it is an i7. It can render the average Blender scene with the advanced add-on in around 1.5 hours.

Blender can render with both CPU and GPU at the same time however it is only useful when the CPU and GPU are of equivalent "power". Otherwise if not balanced, the weaker element will slow the process down. For example one of my nodes as a RTX 2080 Ti and an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with 12 threads. However, the GPU is that much quicker to render than the CPU that I render with the RTX card only. I also have another combo RTX2060 and AMD ryzen 5 but in this case it is still better to render with both.

@samino 4K images can be rendered in just a few minutes on Mecabricks 😉

Well, yes. 😄 But, sometimes people like to have access to more settings, and a downloaded copy of the model with the advanced add-on gives them that opportunity. And plus, not everyone has credits for 4k images on Mecabricks. 😉

I just encountered a bug. I installed the latest version of the advanced add-on and I can't import parts with glitter, speckle, or milky materials. The error says something about location unknown.

This is not really a bug. This is a new addition to Mecabricks which is not available yet in the add-on. The material system is still in development and the add-on will be updated when it is stable.

Ah, okay. Thank you.

Hello, sorry but I have yet ANOTHER question. Unfortunately it is an extremely vague one. When I look my render: https://imgur.com/RjObtX4
It looks ok. But when I compare it to the example pictures for the Advanced Add-On or certain other users renders, It doesn't look nearly as real. So if someone could tell me what could be wrong, possibly with the lighting? I am using HDRI Haven's Venice Sunset for lighting.

I haven't downloaded your file but one thing you'll almost certainly want to do when using HDRI's is experiment with the Z axis rotation of the HDRI. That's done by changing the rotation value on the Mapping Node. I usually start at 0 then increase rotation mounts by 90 degrees and go full circle. I'll then narrow it down when I start to getting that suits. Having a bunch of HDRI's to choose from also helps.

This is where you artistic ability will be tested.
Three things that you can work on is:

1. Lighting - HDRI is the easy but lazy way. Lighting is a job in itself but you can definitely improve this skill by watching tutorials online (digital render or even real life photography).
2. Camera position and orientation
3. Environment. A plain white background is a bit boring.

Please do not post the blend file as it includes the material and textures from the Advanced Addon that remain Mecabricks property as per the license.