Star Wars Lego 3D Art

[noreha]

Woah, you even customized them!

Yeah that's the advantage of using 3D, I can look at how the decals will look, and I can change them very easily, I just need to learn how to create nice looking decals, I have just been grabbing what I can from the net and texturing the models to see... btw, anyone got a nice scan of the cw obi wan head and torso that I may use?

[noreha]

And so the Tantive IV is well under way...

From this...

To this...

[drdavewatford]

These pics are great, but I'm totally mystified by the process of 'modelling' the parts - how do you actually do this and create the images ?

Dr. D.

[Palms]

Wow, lately I've been looking into some different sub-forums and I must have missed this, but wow they're incredible they look so much like actual LEGO. The only problem is the clone helmets... they just don't look right somehow. Other than that great work!

[noreha]

latest tantive iv images...

[drdavewatford]

Where can I find a description or tutorial outlining the process of creating these 3D images ?

D.

[not-in-use-anymore]

Why does the back image have the top missing?

[noreha]

Tantive IV is now finished (kind of - almost finished the textures for the control panels - but you wont see them unless I open it up)

so now I will look at starting the 8039 - Venator Republic Attack Cruiser...

[John31388]

Wow that awesome

[brickfoot]

Great work.

[KimT]

Do you have other projects for when you're all done with the Tantive IV?

[noreha]

Do you have other projects for when you're all done with the Tantive IV?

I was thinking about doing 8039 - Venator Attack Cruiser, 7674 - V19 Torrent or 8088 - ARC Starfighter, or even doing a couple of non-star wars things (cars from batman or speedracer)

[Lorentzen]

This 3D art looks amazing.

But I am not the only one clueless as to how it's all done. Do you take pictures of a LEGO brick and then load that into a 3D program, and then build the LEGO model (of for example an X-Wing) in a modded version of Lego Digital Designer that will let you load your own bricks?

If not, please let us know how all of this is done

Edited June 1, 2010 by Lorentzen

[TerranCmdr]

I thought I'd do a quick write-up of how I do things. This is not speaking for all 3d artists and programs obviously, but this is how I go about making my LEGO models in 3d.

Please see the bottom for glossary of terms and program information.

First of all, this site has been immensely useful. I don't have calipers so measuring such small pieces on LEGOs is hard for me to do.

When beginning a new piece, I'll first see if I have it in my collection. I find it a lot easier to model the piece if I have it in front of me and can turn it around and look at it from different angles.

As you can see, I already have a number of pieces I use to cut out certain parts of the bricks. I have cylinders for the top and bottom, as well as for cutting out the holes in Technic beams and a cross shape for cutting holes for axles.

I'll usually start by making a box. Say I'm going to make a 2x4 plate. I know from the site I posted above that each stud = 8mm, so I'll make a box 16x32. However, I need to account for the space between bricks when they are connected, so the actual size of my box will be 15.8x31.8. (The height is 3.2, or 1/3 of 9.6, the height of a brick)

Once I have my box, I will bevel the underside so the plate can sit on top of other bricks. After making 100+ different pieces, I have figured out the exact measurements I need and recorded them so I can have all my bricks uniform. In this case, I need to bevel in -1.5 and extrude in -2.4.

Now that that's taken care of I can place the cutout pieces for the studs. This is done using a tool called array.

I have the studs placed, now I can use the same technique to put the buffers on the underside of the plate.

Now that all my cutout pieces are placed, I can perform a boolean function. What this does is basically fuse all the parts together. The settings can be tweaked to either leave the object connected, remove it completely, leave a hole, leave an imprint, etc. In this case I'm choosing the "imprint" option. This will leave an imprint of the objects on my plate so I can extrude the studs and buffers from there, making the whole thing one piece.

Picking the objects is as easy as pointing and clicking, and as you can see it doesn't leave the prettiest edgeflow but it works for what I need it to do. All that's left now is to extrude the studs!

The final touch is to add smoothing groups to my newly extruded studs, so they don't look faceted.

After the brick is complete, I'll add a material to it. I already have some materials in my scene that I've tweaked to look (kinda) close to plastic. It's a simple drag and drop interface to apply the material to the object.

Once the material is applied, lights can be added to the scene and we can render!

And that's about all there is to it. Some pieces are definitely harder to model than others, but they all start basically the same. When combined, the pieces can turn out to look like this!

I hope this was informative to those of you who were interested. Please note that this is my own process, noreha's process might be totally different from mine because he uses a different program, and because everyone is different!

Glossary of terms (Please note these are all basic explanations)

Bevel - In this context, a tool used to take a face (that is, the connection of four vertices) and copy it. Various settings can be applied to make the face bigger and smaller, and to change its position.

Extrude - A simpler function used only to copy and move a face over one axis.

Edgeflow - The composition and position of edges on an object. An edge in this sense basically refers to the connection of two vertices. For example, most models need a consistent edgeflow in the sense that the edges are parallel to each other.

Array - A tool used to make multiple copies of an object. Settings that can be changed include total number of copied objects, offset of copies from one another, distance the copies will cover, etc.

Render - Taking the graphical representation and geometry information of the 3d model, calculating materials, lights, shadows, and geometry, and producing (in this case) an image.

Programs used:

3d Studio Max 9

Photoshop CS

[noreha]

TerranCmdr - I do it in pretty much the same way, except I bought some calipers to get some of the measurements, I have about 300+ pieces done (varying from technics to castle to ninja), and it's just a case of getting all the right pieces for the sets, by going to peeron to see the inventories of each of the sets, I can then work out what pieces I need to create/modify to complete the set. I started doing the Lego modeling about 5 years ago got about 100 pieces done, then life got in the way and I only got back into it earlier this year, but have been working fairly hard getting more done.

I have been enjoying the challenge of doing each individual piece, but not having some of the pieces in front of me does make it difficult as I have to make assumptions based on similar pieces and just plain make it up as I go along... but it is fun, especially when you look at the progress pictures as you go through the manuals.

I am constantly refining the models (because I am a bit of a perfectionist) and it's all I think about when I am at my main job (sketch pad and pencil sit on my desk for recording of my thoughts).

Thanks everyone for the C & C, keep it up!

[Lorentzen]

In-depth tutorial

Thanks a ton. I might try this out if I can find some extra time

Edited June 2, 2010 by Lorentzen

[TerranCmdr]

Hey, no problem. Always willing to help out newbies. :P

I didn't get a chance to say but noreha, your renders always impress me. Very clean and crisp. Your modeling looks spot on too.

[noreha]

Hey, no problem. Always willing to help out newbies. :P

I didn't get a chance to say but noreha, your renders always impress me. Very clean and crisp. Your modeling looks spot on too.

Thanks for that, I found a good lighting set-up a while back for lightwave and have been slowly tweaking it to get the best results I can, it helps that lightwave has global illumination as standard now and I don't have to fake it with rotating light rigs, I really like the x-wing you did, very nice! I must ask, does max have an object limit like lightwave does? I notice if I have over 750 pieces it will have issues and I will need to merge pieces, which sucks!

[TerranCmdr]

Fortunately Max doesn't have an object limit. You're really just limited by the power of your computer. I have some significant slowdowns when panning around the X-wing because it's something like 500k polys but there's ways around that. And thanks!

Btw, it's a secret, but I'm working on the midi-falcon right now.

[noreha]

Btw, it's a secret, but I'm working on the midi-falcon right now.

Consider your secret safe with me... and just between you and me, I started work on speed racer and racer x from speed racer, obviously won't be posting it in here...

[Walter Kovacs]

While not nearly as good as noreha and TerranCmdr's work, I have done a little dabbling in Ray-tracing, too. I put this collage together to showcase the UCs and MINI TIEs I had done, although the collage is horribly out of date right now.

The composition of the scene definitely leaves a lot to be desired. At the time I was more concerned with getting the renders of the individual models correct, so I took the individual renders and combined them in Windows Paint program (hey, it was free). That's why all the TIEs are facing the same direction and are the same distance away.

What I really struggle with are camera and lighting placement in the Ray tracing environment. I use MLCad to generate the models (saves me the time of having to model each and every piece), a program called L3P to translate the MLCad file into a ray tracing file and POV-Ray to do the actual rendering. The biggest problem is that POV-Ray uses cartesian vectors. Using a polar vector would be so much easier for camera and light positioning.

Any help you guys can give would be appreciated. If you need more specific information, please ask.

[TerranCmdr]

Glad to see your work posted here, Walter. I'm a big fan.

[Aramor]

@TerranCmdr: glad to see another 3dsMax user. It's also funny we both use the same measurements for the bricks. Two things though. First, I always chamfer the top edges of my bricks with an amount of 0.1, so they look better when stacked. Second, I prefer to use "attach" instead of the boolean way, because personally, I try to avoid using anything that has to do with booleans. It also immediately attaches the meshes together and doesn't muck up the edgeflow.

Here's a little render to show the difference between chamfered (left) and not chamfered (right):

[TerranCmdr]

They definitely look a lot better. I chose not to chamfer mine to keep the polycount down and keep the models workable. May I ask how you went about getting the LEGO on the studs? I've been trying for a while and just can't seem to get it right.

[Aramor]

It's extruded text. It doesn't completely match the actual studs, but still.

And you got a point about keeping the polys down though, some of the bigger models I made, like the Egyptian temple really made my computer complain.