Lego library

Hey

This is the first project I share with you. So I’m not sure, if this is the right forum, or if I should post in the WIP-Forum.

This is a table from the library in my university modeled in Lego.

I would appreciate some critics on the image. What do you think?

In my opinion the whole thing seems to be floating, but I dont know how to solve this. I added a screenshot to show how the background is modeled.

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it looks like it’s floating because there’s no visual referance that it’s actually sitting on anything. that grey sweep behind it could be a million miles away for all we know, there’s nothing to give it any sense of scale or unify it with the ground layer of legos in any way

how could I achive such a reference? Would it help to let the background be visible also in front of the legos?

And I have a little newbie question. Is it possible to change the preview-picture of the thread into the actual renderimage?

it would absolutely help to see the front edge of the lego platform resting on the table top. The way that you have it lit right now it would cast an obvious shadow onto the tabletop surface, establishing it as solid regardless of the material. Intuition would make the sense of the floating background go away.

also, having some light falloff on the background behind the table would help, it would make it appear more solid rather than fading away into infinity in the distance.

I think the thumbnail is simply always the last picture posted into the thread …

Thanks for your help.

I tried shrinking the base and I think it helped a lot.

Would be happy to recieve more suggestions for improvement

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Bingo! much better. with that little detail sorted out I think the composition is very good. For what it is, there’s nothing screaming out at me as something that needs fixing.

Lighting for any scene can almost always be improved in one way or another, but that’s as much about what your final presentation’s going to be as it is for the specific scene.

Is this a smaller part of what’s going to become a larger lego presentation or scene? Or are you interested in how to continue to improve this specific little model?

Thanks for your compliment.

The plan was to model a bigger scene, but I have the problem, that noise is increasing extremely when the scene gets bigger. I think it’s because of the huge amount of reflecting surfaces. So rendertime restricts me to this little scene. (here I have 2000 samples rendered in 2.5 hours)

So if you have any suggestions for improvement let me know.

Is someone able to tell me why each plate on the right hand side has some kind of color gradient on its side? Each plate is dark in the front and bright in the back. But all plates are absolutely parallel. Shouldn’t it be a color gradiant from the far back to the front, but over all plates?

By plate, do you mean the smooth blocks on the tabletop?

No I mean the side of the light gray 4x4 baseplates. I marked it in the picture.

It looks like each plate has its own gradient from dark to bright. I don’t understand why the gradient doesn’t go from the far back to the front in one gradient.

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that’s a really good question, and one that i’m too n00bish at blender to answer.

In some places it looks like there are 2 light sources, in others it looks like there is only one . . .

it could easily be related to that in one way or another.

Is your lighting the same as the screen grab of the solid view above? The one diffuse source with the folded over background as fill?

Using smooth shading on Lego bricks can give you strange results sometimes. From certain angles, a flat surface can reflect light as though it’s curved. That may be what you’re seeing here. Try setting the bricks to flat shaded and just marking the bevelled edges and studs as smooth in edit mode?

2000 samples is a bit overkill. Try to use something a bit more like 500 max (unless it’s your final render and you aren’t going to touch the project again).

If your going for photorealism, your going to need to add a bump map to everything. You also can’t get away with a studio setup. Try putting it in a lego enviroment, or just put it on a wooden table. Anything but a studio setup.

I was googling stuff like this a while ago and found some good materials and textures. You should be able to find them if you google it.

You have done a decent job so far though. I think if I showed this to my famiily, they wouldn’t be able to tell if it was CG or not.

Wow thanks Tardis Maker. Thats a great compliment :slight_smile:

I’m currently experimenting with some bump-maps on the Brick-surfaces. Do you think especially scratches (currently experimenting) and material mistakes are relevant or should I use some kind of noise-bump-map so the bricks appear a bit more rough?

The thing with the smooth setting is a nice hint. I’ll try this and post the result when I’m finished.

What do you think what Lego uses in their renders/product photography for studio setup? are there other models placed around?
Let’s look at this helicopter: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=506373
The photography (I think it’s no CG) on the box. What do you think was the studio setup? I do not recognise any reflections from the environement. But my eyes aren’t trained. So was ist a whitebox? Anyway, is it possible to transfer the studio setup from photograpy to render?

EDIT: I forgot to answer the number of lights. There is the one big light-plane, visible in my first post. A second light-plane is mounted inside the dark grey 1x6-Tile at the very front seat. Its light falls down onto the table so you can see a little bright spot on the middle between the facing tables in the fery front.

EDIT2: I finished the set smooth test. Thanks 0ldscratch. I marked the plates als flat and I think this fixed the problem.
I also sharpened the bump-map of the lego-logos on the studs. I’m not sure if this improved the render…

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I played around with the materials and set them up in a new way. I added more reflection to the bricks because I studied the real ones and think that in the previous render there is too little reflection. But I’m not really sure if it improved the render. I attached the old and the new material for those who are interested in it.
I took a photo of the real Lego-model to compare them. (The camera isn’t the best one) It’s nearly the same setup like in the render. The reflection in the table-surface is much more visible than in the render. Thats the reason for changing the material. But I’d appreciate your opinion.

Additionally I added some DOF to the scene.

Also there are now Bump-maps with scratches on the Bricks.
The update in the studio setup is a new ceiling like in the real library. There’s more to come.

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YOU DON’T SEE ANY IMPROVEMENT? That is a huge amount of improvement. I think almost everything about it is more realistic. These reflections look a bit funky though:



Keep going. Any chance we might see a lego ocean similar to what was used in The Lego Movie?

Thanks, I would rally like to do this, but I think I have a lack of computing power.

I’m not sure what you mean by your markings in the photo of the set. Do you mean in the render it looks different (because in the render there is less reflection on the table-surface so the reflection is nearly invisible) . The “white” dots in the reflection are caused by the holes inside the bricks of the pillars.

Ok, I see that now. It just looks a bit odd, but they should be there.

You should be using “Sub Surface Scattering”. It is probably the most important, and often forgotten part in a plastic material. You should also use the “fresnel” node to mix between glossy and diffuse (actually you shouldn’t use diffuse at all). Here my a suggestion for a plastic material:


Here is a side by side comparison of your material and my suggested material.


Notice how the sharp edges are softer, and light is visible through the mesh because of the SSS. Looking at your own reference, the same thing is true. Also using a fresnel node to mix between glossy and the other shader is accurate to the real world. Make sure to set the rendering mode to “experimental” if you want to use your GPU to render SSS in Cycles :slight_smile:

Note: The scale for the SSS is not necessarily accurate with your image, because it varies with the scale of the scene. Fiddle with it to get the right result.

Thanks for the material advice. I changed it to SSS and rendered it with 1000 samples. Thats the result:


I think much more samples are necessary now.

I included the current Node-setup:


additionaly I added bump maps of some results from the injection moulding process like the burr where the parts of the form come together or the optical effect opposite of the ribs inside the brick.

I think it isn’t ideal how the bump map is created at the moment. I have these two maps which should become one:



I could easyly do it in Gimp but I want to do it inside blender to stay more flexible. I assume mixing the two together isn’t the best way to do it. How is this done properly?

Can you give me a guess if it’s normal that all my 8GB of RAM are completely full with that “little” scene? How could I improve the memory usage, for being able to increase the scene size? Like for example an Lego-Movie Ocean… :wink:

To mix the bump maps you could use ‘darken’ with a factor of ‘1.000’. Also it turns out the ‘Fresnel value’ for plastic is around 1.45 so maybe change that.

For the ram: first make sure there is no unnecessary geometry. Next go to user preferences and under the system tab increase ‘memory cache limit’. Alternatively you can disable start-up programs to get a little extra RAM. I also have 8GB RAM and I rarely go above 2 so it’s quite odd that it happens for you.