mali

I modeled, textured and rigged the minifigs myself. I used the character studio biped in 3ds Max for rigging, it's pretty straightforward once you learn the basics, but it certainly takes some skill and time to set it all up properly (though certainly easier than rigging a realistic human ). If you want to have this kind of bendy movements that real minifigs can't do, you really need to have a nice clean topology on the models (enough polygons to enable the bendy movement).

Thank you for the kind comments :) Yes, the main software used was 3ds max.

After my last video of a CG Lego pirate diorama I wanted to try making something different, a real brick flick. I'm not totally happy how it turned out, wish I could change some things but I have learned a lot and had both fun and frustration while making this. Hope you like it. Thanks for watching. Warning: The video contains scenes with graphic violence towards bricks, but no real bricks were harmed during the making of this film.

Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation. I already explained this process to someone via personal message, so I will just copy the same text here. Hope it helps you, but as hrontos wrote, you would be better off creating the minifig model yourself, because the LDD minifig model would certainly not be suitable for animation due to its simple topology. Anyway, here is the process: First of all, you need 3ds max 2008. As far as I know, it can't be done without it, because it requires a script that works with that version of max... Next, you need 3DVIA PrintScreen, which you can download here: http://www.3ds.com/products/3dvia/3d-xml/1/ It captures a 3d scene from opengl applications like LDD. It's similar to a screenshot, only it captures the 3d geometry displayed in LDD and stores it in a 3dXML file. The 3d XML viewer that you can download from the same link can be used to view those files as 3d geometry but it can't export it in any acceptable 3d format. (It seems that the PrintScreen application is not present on the linked download page any more, please find it elsewhere yourself) Now you need to get the script I mentioned from here: http://www.4shared.com/dir/5807782/1c394251/KoichiSenada.html#dir=5807793 (just get the latest version, 2008.11.25., it works for me) and install it. When you run the script, you need to browse for the source file (3dxml), then click on "Read Source" (don't forget this), then choose a destination and click "Write Destination". The mesh is then imported, but it will be rotated wrong so you need to manually correct it.

This is just amazing, very impressive..

Such an amazing scene, very well done. Is that head in the water a baby? Nice details.

Those are really cool, well done. I wonder if he uses Pepakura or is it hand made somehow?

OK, I tried using the audio swap option now with some random reggae tune, so please ignore it for now, I may change it again later. I guess you guys should be able to see the video now, I'm a bit noobish on Youtube. Thanks! Oh and also a huge thanks for the mention on the blog

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Yeah, a lot of patience was involved =) I now see it says the video is blocked in Germany and the USA due to copyrighted music Can you guys not see it? Should I re-upload without the music?

Not at all, thanks for embedding it and thanks for the compliments =)

Thanks a lot guys, I appreciate it =) @TalonCard I'm glad you like the pirate version of the Caribbean Clipper, I was afraid people would just say I'm lazy for not modeling the Black Seas Barracuda or something @Hiawatha, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I probably won't be animating this scene any further, it got too huge to handle everything. I would need to simplify it and plan different shots to make it work. And I'm just one guy with a single pc, it would take ages to do it. But who knows, maybe some day... I'm planning to do some other themes as well, but with more animation.

Yeah, I could have millions of bluecoats if I wanted :D Thanks =)

Thanks guys! I imported many of the parts that were available from LeoCAD, but I remade many of them to make them look better from up close and then arranged everything together in max.

After a long time working on this scene (almost 200 hours just for rendering alone) I've finally finished this animation. It's been done in 3ds Max. There's some more info on it in my first post here: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=60015 Hope you like it The (720p available)EDIT: I had to remove the original music due to copyright issues, so it's now replaced with a random reggae tune. Please ignore it, it was not my original intention. And some stills:

Nice, me and my brother got 2 of these each, because our dad forgot he bought them to us and he remembered we wanted them We also got 2 lances for each knight. I never noticed this picture on the left, it looks like they made him taller, looks cool

How does one find those unedited exports from LEGO? @aposaric: Like someone else said, just use LeoCAD http://www.leocad.org/trac It exports natively to obj format ;) There is a way to export models from LDD as well, but it's somewhat complicated and involves jumping through hoops and such :D so I won't get into how to do that unless there is a demand for it :) LDD parts are not the same as LDraw parts BTW and there are some parts in LDD that aren't in LDraw library.

Thanks for the welcome everyone Sorry, I didn't see your post till now. I didn't create everything from scratch, I exported a lot of stuff from LeoCAD http://www.leocad.org/trac After that I used those bricks as a guide for dimensions and some of them I had to remodel because they didn't look very good to me :) LeoCAD actually uses parts from the LDraw library http://www.ldraw.org/ But I find LeoCAD easier to use, its GUI is similar to Max and it's easier to export to obj format. Which program do you use? BTW I'm also on Kockice forum, if you haven't seen my post, so we can speak our own language there ;)

Hey, I'm also from Zagreb and I work in 3d visualization. Small world pozz

Hello, my name is Dejan, I'm from Zagreb, Croatia. I'm 27 and I work as a 3d modeler and animator for an architectural visualization company. Hopefully this won't be too long to read I started getting into LEGO again which were my favourite toys while growing up. I still have all my old sets from the early to mid 90's and I started collecting the new minifigures for fun and inspiration. I discovered the forum through the Classic Pirates blog, as I'm working on a 3d moc and was looking for some inspiration. I'm fairly limited by space and budget and I love creating stuff in 3d, so I started this little moc with the classic pirates theme, but after seeing all the wonderful creations you guys make, I decided to try to make it as big and as epic as I can. I used some LDraw pieces, but I heavily modified them or remodeled from scratch as I wanted to make them look more convincing and real. I used 3ds max which I also use for my work. I'm wondering in which section I should post it when it's finished so as many people can see it... I'm attaching a little teaser image, there's a lot more to be done and I need to fix some colours, but I hope you guys will like it. Unfortunately it will take a lot of time to finish it and especially to render it (I'll make a short fly-through animation) I'm now struggling to build a cliff surrounding this little bay... I also did some 3d animation tests for videos I plan to make later, which you can see on my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/mali22?blend=22&ob=5 Thanks for looking Uploaded with ImageShack.us And this is what it looks like in max without rendering (many more pieces added, and I know, shameless reusing of Caribbean Clipper ) Uploaded with ImageShack.us