Renderbricks

Hello, long time, no post. After my intense research on how to render Digital LEGO® in a photoreal look with different 3d applications in 2014 and my very first posting here with the Snow Speeder, a lot has happened. For 5 years I am a professor of animation/VFX and I am using Digital LEGO a lot for my courses to teach my students fundamental techniques and workflows. Literally learning by playing! I like to share my latest case studies from my course "Look Development – 3D Tracking" with LEGO Technic models. The general workflow is not really complicated but it needs some effort and rendering power to get to a point of visual satisfaction. And it's still not perfect. Read the description below the videos for further details. Thanks for your time and enjoy!

I am happy to announce this breathtaking 360° VR Tour of the fantastic LEGO Ideas project "Bag End" by Felix 'saabfan' Stiessen. Make sure you turn on the sound loud or use headphones for the best experience. Update on LEGO Ideas 360° VR Tour You can experience the tour with a PC, a smartphone (with cardboard) or you enjoy the show full immersive with a VR headset like the Oculus Quest. To look around in the 360° Tour press Left-Mouse-Button and drag the cursor across the screen or simply swipe with your finger when viewing on a mobile device. You can navigate to the next image by clicking or tapping on the small icons. When you use your smartphone with cardboard just turn your head and body around. Move the central pointer over the floating spheres, keep it a second and you will "move" to the next location. For the most impressive and immersive experience with the VR headset, you have to click with your controller at the floating spheres. Note for cardboard and headset users: There's a bug when you turn around and "move" to the next location. The body/head rotation will be added and you will face in the wrong direction. This is confusing. I hope for a fix soon. This project was created with Mecabricks and rendered and Blender. Support Renderbricks on Patreon for more VR projects and tutorials Credits Music Achaidh Cheide by Kevin MacLeod Pippin the Hunchback by Kevin MacLeod

Thanks. I never was aware of this.

Looks like we have a tragic user error here of the mimimillennial generation. ;-) And yes: The rendering is THE shit. ;-)

I am pretty sure it's LDraw data maybe here and there optimized. It would be insane to model everything from scratch. But I haven't checked it yet. It's a nice concept but finally not as flexible and good like Mecabricks. Well, it's a good start for a method directly in Maya. Modeling a part library is a huge part for one person. Nicolas Jarraud got more and more support over the years but he's also doing most of the models and for the decorations we have one member in the community doing an insane good job. The problem with LDraw data is that they don't support textures and not everything is perfect. And it has some limits due to its proprietary data format. For lots of special parts he's using a 3d scanner for basic references to retopologize. The only "issue" with Mecabricks data is that Nicolas decided in the beginning to use low-res parts for WebGL and kept on using it for all the other parts. In 2015 after we got in touch he started to implement features for rendering. His advanced addon has a feature to add real bevels and use a subivision modifier but that will not work with everything properly. The only solution would be to recreate a new set parallel but that's again a huge task. Overall the models work very well but at close ups or hi-res renders you'll recognize the limitations. I can live with that because the final render quality and possibilities with Blender are unique with a lot of potential for the LEGO community and ... TLG. ;-)

Fantastic work and evolution of the best and most powerful LEGO® editor.

@anothergol As a 3d pioneer and professor for animation/vfx, running my own business for over 20 years I just can say as a very experienced professional that Mecabricks is a brilliant and innovate LEGO tool very easy to use and extremely powerful because of the export and render features. Additionally it's a fantastic and creative start for teaching my students the principles of 3d and rendering. You want something for free and different. If you are not able to adapt to software for some personal reason or you just hate this amazing work (for no reason) then keep on working with LDD and Stud.io and feel happy with it. Issue solved. You are posting in a wrong thread. ;-)

Saw it on Brothers Brick and had to respond on a posting yesterday on FB because some poeple still believe that LEGO is shit because of all the special parts. :-D

Hello LEGO® fans, I like to post my latest research test. I started 2014 with Modo and LDRaw and passed my ideas and results to Nicolas 'SCRUBS' Jarraud, the french genius who gave us Mecabricks, and he developed a very nice Blender addon what gives us access to high-end renderings out of the box. A long time I ignored Blender but since last year we switched to this impressive open source application for my animation studio pipeline. Therefore I started to learn Blender and it's worth any minute because this is really a serious competitor for all other commercial 3d applications. Just the fact that Blender is a 108MB ZIP archive and starts in a second makes it very special. It has everything you need for animation and visual effects. I am not a Blender professional yet because I am running my studio as a CEO and actually I started an upcoming professorship at a private university. And I have a family with two kids. So it's a miracle that I am posting here. :-D Rendering Digital LEGO® is my personal project called Renderbricks what brought back all my passion for 3d. I wished the day had 48 hours. Due to my activities with Renderbricks I try to post constantly work starting with Facebook, updating flickr, posting on Twitter and adding to ArtStation to get as much attention and followers as possible. This is a time consuming process what needs a lot of patience and energy to keep the project running. And three years later now I will have a call with The LEGO Group next week because an Innovation Director is interested in my work. I am excited. :-) With Renderbricks I am also in touch with a lot of nice people. Actually a programmer is developing a Modo importer for LDRaw what looks very promising. I am also in chat with GitHub user TobyLobster who developed ImportLdraw for Blender. This addon is really fantastic. And I have a lot of contacts to MOC designer but of course I can't render everything. Researching LEGO® never ends. Here's another stress test with Blender. And I am impressed again about this open source software what beats most commercial competitiors in many aspects. This amazing LEGO® ISD Aggressor model by Matthew 'raskolnikov' Benner has 14.531 parts with instances and 56.489.080 triangles in Blender. The scene size is compressed saved only 91.306 MB. The render size is 15.360 x 8.640 pixel (15K). CPU Render time on a Dual Xeon 12 core is 2h 13min only with the latest Blender build and the Denoiser. This is really insanely fast. The key here is the new Denoiser technology in the latest 2.79 release what helps to keep samples low at 64 in Branched Path mode. The performance of the Blender scene is amazing. Compared to Modo much faster overall. No refresh issues. Real time handling here on my DELL with GTX 780. Fast loading and saving. And here all bricks have real bevels. In Modo they use a rounded edge shader. I guess the plastic material needs a bit more SSS because the Modo results look a bit better actually. I have ordered two GTX 1080Ti Founder's Edition to speed this up :-) Here you can download a wallpaper for your specific screen. Click on the picture and click again too zoom at 100% to enjoy the 15K details.

I use 3DVIA Printsceen with SimLab for Modo. This will convet also a color table and I can replace this with a setup in Modo with one click. Here are some LDD captured renderings. It would make sense to use Collada with instances. But due to missing intormations for each brick this might not work to create instances. The actual LeoCAD can import LDD information. From here you can use LDR to import with Blender with this great and fast addon what also supports good looking plastic shaders and very. very important: instances. ImportLDRaw

@SylvainLS Check PM!

MPDCenter - load MPD - select the specific LDR in the list - Extract > Selected in LDR inline - takes a while till the Save dialog opens

I extracted the MPD into a single LDR.

I tried to import it with the Blender LDR-importer but this is too big. The Blender import took around 24 hours and the file is over 2.5GB compressed. I can't export it to fbx/Collada to import into Modo. These files are 7 and 10GB and can't be loaded. There's a beta LDR importer for Modo but it will create merged meshes. Tried to load the mesh but failed due to memory issues (32GB here). I contacted the programmer to add instancing support what Mecabricks does. This is the only chance to deal with huge LEGO models like this. I also had to convert the MPD file to LDR with MPDCenter because LDD can't read MPD. The result looks good in LeoCad but LDCad can't read that completely. Maybe here's the problem?