LEGO® CAD and POV-Ray

LDraw^™
is a freeware CAD program base
(Windows Macintosh Linux) which comes along with a bunch of font ends and add ons.
Homepage of LDraw: www.LDraw.org

LDraw^™ is an open standard for LEGO^® CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes. You can use it to document models you have physically built, create building instructions just like LEGO^®, render 3D photo realistic images of your virtual models and even make animations.
The possibilities are endless. Unlike real LEGO^® bricks where you are limited by the number of parts and colors, in LDraw nothing is impossible.

For download (Windows Macintosh Linux)
of the LDraw^™ package go here:
www.LDraw.org, see "Get Started
There you will find extended descriptions and guides for the installation of the LDraw components.

The Windows version used for my works here is "LDraw_setup_2006q3_full_J.exe"
It works good also with Windows Vista, if you install the LDraw folder in C:\LDraw instead of C:\Program files\LDraw.

The best way I found to bring LDraw virtual LEGO^® models to POV-Ray format is via LeoCAD with the use of the LGEO POV Library. The newest version of this library (12-2008) you can download at www.digitalbricks.org/lgeo.html.
This is a set of include files for POV-Ray which replaces most triangle meshes from LDraw by POV-Ray primitives to achieve perfectly rounded shapes.
See my chapter LDraw + LeoCAD for further details.