LEGO Digital Designer (.lxf) Import Script

Coding Python Support
1

Hello,

I make LEGO animations using Blender and LDraw and it works alright. But LDraw is difficult to model with, especially on bigger models. LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) has a very easy and intuitive interface that lets you quickly build large models. The problem is that when you export from LDD (.lxf) to LDraw (.ldr) not all of the data communicates, meaning a model may be missing certain pieces that aren’t in the LDraw system of tools library. So if I build a large model using many of the non-existent LDraw pieces in LDD I’ll end up having to rebuild a large portion of the model in LDraw which is not fun and takes valuable animating/rendering time.

So, what I’m looking for is a .lxf importer for Blender. Something direct, not through LDraw. I would love to make one myself, but have no experience with coding of any kind (except HTML). I need some techy fellows to make a script that, I believe, would be well appreciated by the Blender/LEGO community. If there are any people who know how to script, and are interested, please tell me so I know someone got the message. It wouldn’t need to be a very complex plug-in. Just the basic import-ability. Eventually it would be awesome to make it more complex (automatically rigs minifigures, applies textures, etc), but the basic function would be the only necessity to start with.

Thank you so much!
~Creatorbros3~

2

Dude, I would love that! Someone really needs to figure it out…

3

I had a quick look. Lxf files are basically zip files containing a thumbnail and an lxfml file (which is xml). The lxfml contains the actual model information.

Lxfml files seem simple enough, but there is one problem: lxfml doesn’t contain any geometry data. It’s just location, rotation, materialID and a designID for each part. Lego Digital Designer maintains a library of those designID’s, which I assume contain the geometry.

So the tricky part is to get the meshes for those designID’s.

4

Check out mecabricks.com. It’s a modern, browser-based Lego editor coming with an LDD import feature. To get your models into Blender, you export to Collada (OBJ and STL are supported, too) and use a freely available template to apply Cycles materials to your models. Mecabricks is well maintained, has an active community and a big parts and model library that is constantly growing.