hey guys i rendered these 5 images for use in my portfolio, i am trying to get sponsored and will use these to help make my case to the company.
i know there are a few errors but i am hoping they are not to big to make much of a difference, they will be printed at 6x8" and were rendered at 2400x1800
Alltaken
awesome work. They look very good
the only thing is that they are all (as far as I can see) kinda easy to model, you know, straight lines, circles, cylinders.
So maybe for a portofolio you need some harder models too, maybe some organic.
But this things look very good, nice materials, they just look like lego
Very nice and supreem rendered models !!!
Uhh I feel ashamed of my lego buggy when looking at these… :-? Awesome work. How did you get the lego lamp to look that good?
And with all that beveling, detail and such great materials, they are far from being easy to model. Photorealistic work.
thanks everyone
and BTW, about 6 hours per piece, max of 3 pieces modeled a day (the easiest ones like 2x1 bricks)
i think they look easy because they are clean 
http://doug.mud-puddle.co.nz/albums/lego/huge.jpg
but i guess its an illusion
Alltaken
I think what he meant with the “easy” comment is that modelling lego blocks isn’t the hardest thing to do. and if you want to show how good modeller you are, some other objects might work better.
and I have to agree to that. 
these are very fine renders, so they really show that you can set up some lights and render them up nicely… but, model is not your design, and they are just building blocks, so they don’t show the full supreme amazingness of your modelling skills.
.b
i think they look easy because they are clean
but i guess its an illusionAlltaken
Yeah, the mesh is more difficult then I thought, but I know you have skills to make difficulter meshes.[/quote]
Hi!
Those are very nice, clean renders. Unfortunately, they didn’t strike me at first as showing good modelling skill. The reason: I have encountered several lego CAD programs on the internet such as Leocad. With these programs you could make the models there in about 15 minutes. I was far more impressed when I realised that you modelled them completely in Blender. Well Done! They are beautiful renders! Just keep in mind that Lego might not be the best thing to show how well you can model.
Good luck with your portfolio.
You forgot the little Lego logo on every little bump up (what would you call those?) 
Aside from that very small detail they are very nicely done 
Good job on the lights; the transparency and refraction looks great. The rest of the pieces though, seem a little bit too shiny to me, especially the large curved pieces with flat surfaces. Normally those pieces have rough tops. The wheels on the blue buggy have weird striations that look like a problem with smoothing, but that’s probably easy to fix. At this level of detail, the lack of Lego logos is really quite noticeable. The wheels look a little bit too much like plastic and not enough like rubber to me.
Overall, great work. This is some of the best manual lego modeling I’ve seen.
Matt
Alltaken,
Very nice renders. I disagree with most everyone else here, I think these peices showcase your modeling talent very well. While the overall geometery of the peices may not be as difficult as a head per say, arriving at the clean meshes you have is difficult in its own right. As a company, solid modeling foundation is what I would be looking for over the complexity of a model. Very well done.
P. Thompson
When i first looked at them i thought that they werent much to be showing off in a portfolio, but then i went through the steps to make it in my head and i realized that it is hard!
Have any of you seen the commercial for a Honda Element that is made by falling lego bricks from the sky?
BMD
wow that is amazing work. very clean and detailed.
mystery
i think the thing that people think makes this easy to do is the flatness of the faces???
no offense to people but a model of a face/ head takes about the same time as a single piece of lego. the only difference is that a face is made up of smooth /rounded sides so people think its harder to do.
as for lego, Blkender is one of the worst software packages to make lego models in, in somthing like MAYA the intersection of solid mesh’s is easy. in blender its damn near impossible.
from experience its about 5x harder to do a complex lego piece than to do a face (you can go and look at the face i did in 2 hours if you want (first face i ever made))
the only thing i understand is that yes Lcad, and Brickcad and such exist, these software titles seriously dilute any work that i did.
just because its got flat sides doesn’t mean it was easy, note that blender doesn’t suport N-gons, or intersection (no booleans is shit)
Alltaken
ok guys now after my rant on peoples opinion that it was easy LOL. (i agree that it doesn’t look as impressive as it was difficult)
i would like to ask for help on things people pointed out.
A) how to i get my pieces to look less shiney, but still reflect things. i notice that in the real ones the reflections are fuzzyish, and that they only reflect when close to the thing they are reflecting. but in yafray i cannot find any of these settings, and fresnel doesn’t do what i was after.
can i assign a tiny sub-pixel stucki texture to the material and set it on effecting the nor, or somthing like that, so it scatters the reflections a tiny bit.
thanks guys, i agree the render doesn’t look very real, and its too shiney
Alltaken
If fresnel doesnt give you the right results, I think some kind of bumpmapping is the best solution. Because very little disturbances on the surfaca(?) of lego pieces create that less shiney reflective sights.
I hope Iam right :-? and I hope I helped you. Great work
Walibie
Oh I find the model alone quite complex Have you beveled the bricks as a last step? I find it quite hard to combine smooth and solid surfaces in a subsurf model.
What I find absolutely intriquing about these renders is the studio-like lighting. I suppose this is yafrays GI, but could you perhaps enlighten me about the mastery of making the shadows make a sharp outline while having a nice soft fill within.
What sort of lamp setup is this?
the models are not sub surfed.
yeah its yafray with a single spot light added with a soft soft edge, its about power 6. the GI dome is power 2 (skydome only)
thats all, no secrets LOL
i might try re-render them with a tiny tiny bump map on them
Alltaken
Or if you have photoshop, render the reflection out as a sepperate pass, blur it, and composite the two
Beautiful and photorealistic! How do you get smooth faces and sarp ones in what seems to be the same object?
