Photoreal LEGO Rendering

[fatsomania]

Would this be achievable with Mecabricks and Blender? I already like it (Mecabricks and Blender) better than LDD and Pov-Ray. I've seen your renders on Mecabricks but if I'm not mistaken they're all rendered on Modo.

[Renderbricks]

Just test out MECABRICKS. The idea and a lot of features to render MECABRICKS comes from me and the BLENDER setup of SCRUBS - the mastermind behind this site - is based on my early MODO setup. The results are awesome. On the forums you can download the BLENDER setup and there's a how-to-tutorial. Even beginners without 3d knowlegde can render breathtaking pictures with this. BLENDER is for free. So let the render overkill begin :-)

Edited February 26, 2016 by virtualrepublic

[Scrubs]

Here is my latest work using Blender.

I exported the minifig hand from Mecabricks and reworked it so that I could use a subdiv modifier.

I drew multiple displacement texture that I added on the top of my normal solid material set up.

Minifigure Hand by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

[CM4Sci]

Whoa.

[Scrubs]

I finally decided to slowly make my way through the minifig body parts to make Batman. Here is the helmet. I added some fingerprints and dust.

Batman Helmet v2 by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

[Nachapon Lego]

Wow! realistic fingerprints + dust + leather material + mold seam.

Please add rough material for roof tile bricks in mecabricks, too.

Edited March 25, 2016 by bbqqq

[dbtrains]

Hey Guys,

Based on the guides by Virtualrepublic and Scrubs, I was able to achieve a fairly good result with Blender Cycles, importing an Ldraw model with the importer. (I had to modify the studs to create non-beveled versions, as I also had problems with the geometry there.) My next step is to try and reproduce some of the original catalog photos :D

(The render is not super high res, I don't have a fast enough machine at the moment..)

[absorbentghost]

How can i download some modular parts , im new to this website and im use LDview software for Lego designing .

[Scrubs]

This post is old, but I am posting here anyway to show you my latest creation based on the new Batman LEGO movie universe. This is built in Mecabricks and rendered with Blender Cycles using the script I provide.

Batman by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

Edited February 5, 2017 by Scrubs

[Blochead]

Hello,

maybe slightly off-topic and late: I am really impressed by how realistic the renderings look like. I am currently trying to train a neural network to recognize LEGO parts. For this I need labeled images of the parts from different angles. At the moment I use LDView to generate the images. However, they are not that photo-realistic so that I expect a high error rate when recognizing photos of LEGO bricks.

Is there a way for a non-professional to batch render the bricks in the quality shown in this thread and if so, how can I do it?

Thank you,

Blochead

[Mylenium]

4 hours ago, Blochead said:

Is there a way for a non-professional to batch render the bricks in the quality shown in this thread and if so, how can I do it?

Not impossible, but you have to decide what you want to do with your life the next three months. Fixing up the geometry and materials will likely take longer than spending a week in a photo studio and taking images of real bricks. Point in case: "Photorealism" pretty much only works on a shot-by-shot basis even with today's unbiased renderers and requires a lot of tweaks. The added difficulty in your case would have to be that the setups would have to be 100% physically plausible or else your AI algorithm would possibly produce wrong results and with that you're basically asking to produce hyper-real images without the usual cheats that still are commonly used in CG. Perhaps it might be more helpful to start a crowd action for people to send in all kinds of random photos of LEGO pieces under different conditions. That would make it much easier to scrape together the hundreds of thousands of shots you may need.

Mylenium

[Scrubs]

It is pretty funny to go back to the start of this thread and see where we were at 6 years ago. It starts to be much more complicated to spot a real and rendered image. I just made this one after modeling or converting the elements to the new Mecabricks part system. I added all the little mould details which was generally the thing to look at in order to know for sure. Not to mention that it all happens online. No stand alone 3D software has been opened 

Edited February 8, 2020 by Scrubs

[Mylenium]

6 hours ago, Scrubs said:

It starts to be much more complicated to spot a real and rendered image.

More complicated, yes, but not impossible. The sucky DOF and the incorrect transparency on the lightning elements gives it away along with some nasty shading noise. ;-)

Mylenium

[Scrubs]

Hummm, you shall check the real minifigure. First of all, the lighting element is not the usual transparent material. For the rest of it, it is a question of taste.

From Bricklink:

 

Edited February 8, 2020 by Scrubs

[Mylenium]

4 hours ago, Scrubs said:

the lighting element is not the usual transparent material

Actually, it appears to be the "new normal", i.e. the new neon transparent yellow introduced last year with the switch to different materials and also used in Ninjago et al. That being the case, it appears too yellow too me, as the material still has a distinct green-ish touch under daylight. The subsurface scattering/ slightly frosted appearance on most of these pieces is of course another matter...

Mylenium

[Scrubs]

Another quick render made online with Mecabricks. All parts of this little model have been upgraded/modeled to the latest standard with all the little details. 4K version is available on flickr. It only took about 8 minutes to render (and actually not much more to set up before hitting the render button).

[M2m]

That’s damn impressive! Great render in excellent quality. 

[Scrubs]

This scene has been built in Mecabricks by Finn Roberts and rendered using the internal system. Everything has been made with just a browser from the user side.

Shift Change at Pier 3 by Finn Roberts, on Flickr

 

Edited October 19, 2020 by Scrubs

[M2m]

That’s pretty darn impressive!!!

[Jim]

O

M

G

[White Phoenix of the Crown]

Cyberpank ?

[Toastie]

On 10/19/2020 at 11:12 AM, Scrubs said:

This scene has been built in Mecabricks by Finn Roberts and rendered using the internal system.

The internal system ... I guess this explains the serious drops outs we had on the world wide web recently ... Amazon's elastic cloud - the whole thing and all - was also down for some time ...

Wow - this is unbelievable. Both from the building side as well as from the rendering side.

(But be honest: This is a photograph of a real build, right? Right? RIGHT? R H I G H T??? No it isn't huh? Is it? ...)

Man. Congratulations on your achievement. Totally beyond grasp for me.

All the very best
Thorsten

(But: It is a photograph of ... isn't it? ... No? Well ...) 

 

Edit: I looked again and closer - this is simply not from this world. I am totally flashed. Man. Fantastic.

Edited October 20, 2020 by Toastie

[Scrubs]

He did an awesome job at building this beautiful sci-fi scene and setting up the lighting. He is much better at doing it than what I could have done even if I designed the system . Then we spent some time trying to find good settings so that it could be rendered.