Renderbricks

Hello LEGO®-Fans, I just updated my next VR Cardboard Demo with the nice LEGO Brick Bank and 16 spots. You'll need a smartphone and a cardboard otherwise it makes no sense. The immersive feeling is stunning. Just stand in the middle of a room and turn around. Move the pointer onto the stars to switch to another point of view. There are some render quality issues inside the building what will be fixed soon™. But for now enjoy a little VR tour outside, inside and on top of a LEGO building like a Minifigure. Links you'll find here. If you use one of these platforms I am happy if you like, follow and spread the word. on Facebook on flickr (link below in Textbox) on ArtStation (link in Description) Enjoy!

You can't export LDD geometry is what I was talking about. But you can capture this through a complicated workflow. Without LEGO logos of course. LDRAW data is usually hard to convert for good looking results. There are a couple of tools what can export in OBJ, 3DMAX etc. but all this gave me useless results. The only way to import good shading LDRAW data is doing it with BLENDER and a script. But there are some random issues with bad normals of special parts. Decorations are not textures but polygons. Unfortunately the importer is not supporting instances and bigger models will be hard to handle. I rendered a Star Wars Executor with 71K bricks what had to be splitted in LDD in two parts because LDD has a limitation of around 40K parts I guess. To import such model from LDRAW would be extremely time consuming and needs a PC with loads of RAM beyond 64 GByte. I would say: impossible. With MECABRICKS I could do it. But also here this needs patience and a minimum of 32 GB RAM and a good PC.

Since I started to play more intense with digital LEGO in 2014 I realized how big and amazing the LEGO subculture is. I bought a couple of nice books and when you look on the internet for LEGO for around one hour you need a break before you get mad. It made me speechless what people build with real LEGO. Some people invest a huge amount of money into this hobby. I always knew that LEGO is more than a toy. But beside the fact that people build huge and amazing MOCs with real bricks it's still a miracle to me how they do this. You need a huge library of all kind of bricks, a lot of time and a lot of knowledge about the existing parts to be able to design the builds. Most of the people are real master builder. LDRAW and LDD opened the world to more possibilities. While it's different to play and build with real LEGO it helps to design and build in advance and to buy just the necessary parts later. But digital LEGO also offers another nice option. You can create pictures in 3D which look real. That's a nice option for people who have no budget to build everything or who have designed a MOC worth a few thousands of dollars in bricks. When I started in 2014 with another round to research how to render digital LEGO I got success this time. But the reason why there are not many advanced results by the community is simply the fact that there are not many digital ressources on the internet. We have LDRAW and LDD. LDD has no export feature and the geometry is in a low resolution. But in 2014 I found a webiste called MECABRICKS what was just made for building and storing models online. I got in touch with the programmer and we unlocked rendering digital LEGO in a complete new way for the community. Well, in case you have a decent PC and willing to learn 3D. To get an impression what is possible today feel free to take a look at some of my results of my personal project called RENDERBRICKS. Artstation flickr Facebook Feel free to subscribe to my fresh YouTube channel. If you have any questions just send me a pm. Cheers Michael

LOL

Thanks for the kind words :-)

Hi legolijntje, what kind of images you like to have? ;-)

Just to let you LEGO guys know: my former account virtualrepublic has been renamed to Renderbricks because I was running two accounts.

An admin was so kind to rename my former account virtualrepublic to Renderbricks.

Enjoy the latest rendering in 8K (7680 Pixel).

Can you recheck. They should be fixed. Thanks! :-)

Update: I completed the model and changed some colors for a closer look to the original movie version. The rear view looks pretty awesome.

A renderer will always just render what's visible but finally you need the complete model depending on what you want to do with it. This LEGO models has of course a lot of models inside which would just make sense when you let the ship explode. To clean this up would take a lot fo time not worth it if you ask me. It would speed up the performance in the viewport but not really the render speed. The geometry is splitted into main meshes and instances what saves a lot of memory. Instance support was a very important feature I asked Srubs for when I was talking about rendering features with him in 2014.

Here it's 67.533.174 with LEGO logos :-)

Hello, I am back to rendering LEGO. It's addictive. It's fun. Especially when I recognized this insane masterpiece by Fox Hound. This might be an ultimative render stress test. I got in touch with him. Her kindly wanted to pass me the LDD for free but sorry - 1.000 hours of work like that has deserved a buy on Ebay. I was pretty surprised about the performance in LDD after loading one 35.000 bricks part. I was more surprised how fast Mecabricks imported the LDD file. Unfortunately some parts are missing there. Will be fixed soon ... hopefully. Mecabricks can import the full model at the end but there are some glitches and Chrome crashes what was a challange for my patience. But finally after one hour I had moved the parts together and exported each part and imported 71.000 bricks (instances mainly) into MODO incl. LEGO logos. This took just a few minutes. I had to set the viewport to bounding boxes and here we go. Click on image for link to hi-res version. Click to zoom. Enjoy! 4K - 1h 16m on i7-410MQ 8K - 4h 51m on XEON E5-2620 v2

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 :-)

Scrubs has this on his to-do-list.

The LDR-Importer just needs two improvements: - instancing support - faster conversation if possible And the scaling should be set to 0.5 instead 0.05 because in my tests in 2014 I recognized geometry issues when parts have small details or you use the LEGO logo meshes for the studs.

You should take a look at MECABRICKS: www.mecabricks.com. There's a BLENDER setup - I think the link is on the forums - for proper materials and a rounded edge shader adding bevels to you bricks and studs. I personally use MODO. WIP and final result of my research 2014 http://www.eurobrick...topic=95004&hl= Hardcore test with the Millennium Falcon UCE with over 5.197 bricks: http://www.eurobrick...topic=95292&hl= I also use BLENDER for importing LDRAW files and export them to FBX for MODO. You should set the scaling to 0.5 because 0.05 creates some strange issues. I modified my library for LEGO logos onto the studs what gives you ofc a very big scene. The Millennium Falcon MODO file is 1.7 GB and has 48 mil polygons. This could be optimized if the LDR-Importer would support instances what MECABRICKS does. The MECABRICKS Millennium Falcon model has "just" 16 mil polygons and the file size is 48 MB due to instancing of repeating bricks. Take a look at my actual Artstation page: https://www.artstati...virtualrepublic *:-)

Honestly I think that MECABRICKS is the better editor compared to LDD. I am not talking about the library but the handling and workflow. I use a method to capture LDD data for rendering in MODO and did not test Bluerender yet. I don't prefer LDD for this because the bricks are low-poly and the textures are extremely low-res. There's an option to save in LDR for LDRAW what is an alternative for me but the workflow to bring bigger LDR creations to my 3d software is slow and needs patience,

Here's a rough and fast test with a iPhone backplate, 3D Camera Track and the Millennium Falcon UCE from MECABRICKS. Works pretty nice.

Hello, I just picked up this amazing MOC: https://www.flickr.com/groups/2821848@N21/ Maybe it's worth for the Frontpage.

This is all brilliant! Keep it up...

What I mean is a normal vector shader simulating a "rounded edge" like what's implemented in MODO and what Scrubs has setup in BLENDER to get a result like this (click on picture for 4K version): All bevels you see here are rendered by the rounded edge shader what will automatically cause seams. Shrinking the bricks isn't really a solution because this requires that all bricks are modeled as one shell with all parts of a brick like studs and pins etc. connected by vertices and polygons to scale the models down by their normals. You could ofc scale them down very slighty by a bounding box center but this will not give you the result what makes the model look real. Beveling each brick needs also a geometry structure as described above but this would increase the geometry extremely and will cause errors for sure.

AWESOME!