Photo-real LEGO scenes.

I’m looking to try out some texturing techniques to make objects imported from LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) and MLCad look like the renders from The LEGO® Movie.

There are some great articals out there on the subject:

This kid even seemed to nail it pretty well:

Since I have yet to really dive in I don’t have much to show, but I am working on building a Rebel Snowspeeder with LDD. I’ve also only slightly played with some lighting and textures on a “Minifig.”


Looking forward to learning a lot about cycles shaders and such!

Dude, SWEET article! Thanks for sharing that. I’ve been thinking about this too, though I’m not sure why :slight_smile: I got excited when I found LDD, and decided to work on some LEGO models when I have more time. My plan is to use appleseed as the renderer though. That’s not a shameless plug, I promise :wink:

That animationmentor article had some really great tips on lighting, and the texturing is pretty critical. Old bricks need weathering, scratching, finger prints, eroding decals, and rougher bricks need a subtle noisy bump.

Some things I’ve been thinking about:
-Beveled edges are important!
-Dirt / AO for older pieces.
-Decals are painted on to pieces, so they should rise off the surface with a subtle bump map, and they should have different specular values since they’re of a different material than the standard plastic surface of a LEGO brick.
-Depth of field is pretty important, since the toys are miniatures. Realistic bokeh can be achieved with bokeh /diaphragm maps.
-Lots of glossy reflections, with interesting glossiness and roughness maps.
-An interesting action shot with good composition.

Also, I don’t know that I think that that YouTube video really “nailed” the effect. The render has GI and all, and some textures, but that doesn’t make for a convincing or interesting render. Now, The LEGO Movie nailed it. Emulate the LEGO Movie renders, and compare your work to it.

I also just realized you’ll probably have a lot more success with models you create yourself, rather than directly using the exported models from LeoCAD, ML CAD, etc. Those models are triangulated and those apps don’t export textures or UVs or anything.

I’ve been looking and I might use RenderMan from Pixar. Of course the that is whenever they finally release their non-commercial use version. Although I’ll probably just stick to Cycles because that’s what I “know” best.

Things that I’ve noticed by looking The LEGO Movie and to re-iterate a lot of what you said:

  • Bevels for sure!
  • Multiple intensities for bump maps (scratches, decals, seems.)
  • Depth of field. VERY important to visualize the scale.
  • Lighting. HDRI will almost be essential.
  • SSS. This is one of the more important things imho. SSS needs to be spot on or the lighting and everything else just doesn’t pop as well.

I have thought of modeling my own mini-figs. Mostly to feel accomplished, but the models I’ve imported from MLCad do have “textures.” Although I may end up just using the models to make textures to then apply to my own mini-fig. Or even retopologize the imported mini-figs. Both would be very new to me.

One thing I’m not too sure on how to do and I think is essential to getting this to look right is the “LEGO” text on the top of every nob. Manually I could do it, but I’m hoping there might be some procedural way to do it?

I don’t have any test images yet. :frowning: Hopefully soon though!

this video. the guys says that all shaders had SSS

Great watch!

Hopefully doing some tests this weekend!