LEGO® Imperial Star Destroyer Aggressor in Super Hi-Res

[Renderbricks]

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.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Renderbricks