Animation of Lego Technic in Blender

[knotian]

I asked on the Blender forums and got no response - let me try here.

I would like to take my Technic MOCs and other Lego sets into an environment where they can be animated and moved. There are several tutorials for graphic packages such as Blender, but they are mainly mini figs or non moving objects.

Has anyone done anything in Blender with Technic Models?

Any links to books, videos, on this subject?

Thanks,

Ed

Edited December 9, 2019 by knotian

[NathanR]

I have experience with Blender, but not so much with animation and certainly not with something as complex as animating technic models.  For getting started with Blender, I'd recommend you visit the Mecabricks website.  They offer a free Blender plugin (and a paid-for advanced plugin with extra features like scratches on the bricks, and slight colour variations), simply export your model from the Mecabricks website as a .zmbx file and import into Blender. 

Each brick is imported as a separate object, but you can group multiple objects together to work with a group (like two wheels on a shared axle). Animation in Blender works using keyframes - you define key positions at certain times in the animation, and the computer fills in the rest of the frames in between. Just about everything can be assigned a keyframe value - position, rotation, scale, etc.  So for a rotating wheel, you define one keyframe at time 0.  Rotate the wheel 360 degrees and define another keyframe at frame (say) 24. Then the wheel will make one revolution a second. You can adjust the interpolation mode to define how fast an object moves from one keyframe to the next, e.g. does it start moving immediately, or does it slowly increase in speed. You can learn a lot about the animation process from the blender documentation here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/keyframes/index.html

The only downside of the Mecabricks Blender plugin is that it is geared around creating photo-realistic images.  Don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic, but the materials are so complex that rendering takes a long time per frame.  Even with reduced quality and the new AI de-noise features, my own attempts at animation take about a minute per frame, or 25 minutes per second of animation. So you'll need either a powerful computer, or you might want to look at creating simpler, more "cartoon-ish" materials for each brick colour.  Using simpler materials would also allow you to use the EEVEE renderer, which trades some quality for super-fast render times (not quite realtime, but not far from it).

 

[Mylenium]

13 hours ago, knotian said:

I would like to take my Technic MOCs and other Lego sets into an environment where they can be animated and moved.

I've been doing technical visualizations in commercial 3D programs for ages, so I know how hard this stuff is. Aside from Blender specifics (personally I never got deep into it and therefore can't advise that much) I think the biggest hiccup in your plan will be the required rigging to get the illusion of motion. Simple rotations for wheels, gears and hinges may be okay, but even something seemingly simple as a steering mechanism can require lots of work, not to speak of more complex motion. You'd likely have to study up a lot about inverse kinematics, using constraints and so on and all that on top of basic animation techniques. None of that happens automatically and will also require you to set up groups in your model, adjust pivot points and so on. Depending on the complexity of your builds this could be endless and consume a lot more time than building your LEGO stuff physically. The sane advise therefore would have to be: If you have alternate venues to present your models and don't want to become what ultimately equals the work of a professional fulltime 3D animator in the technical field, it's perhaps better to focus your energy elsewhere. This isn't something you learn in an afternoon from tutorials and it took me years to perfect some of my techniques doing this all day for 25 years... ;-)

Mylenium

Edited December 10, 2019 by Mylenium

[knotian]

Mylenium,

Great post! I've done my share of warning people of the effort required in other packages and you wording is excellent.

My quandary is that I do large (1:35-40) industrial models and I really can't afford to keep them indefinitely. My boss (BFF,Wife) is wondering where they are going to go.

My plan is to build them, make instructions, publish them with research photos and other background info, modify the model with things necessary for rigging and put them all in a animated movie, and recycle.

I have plenty of time to make it a 'full time' effort, education, challenge, what ever.

I worked with C4D a few years back and have been in programming and analysis since 1960. Can't quit now! ( 81 now and still like learning.)

Ed