This is a short animation and still render of a Lego Star Wars X-Wing taking off. I built the models using LeoCAD, and then exported them from there into Blender 3.4. The Lego material was made by me (you can download it here). Textures are from AmbientCG, and the HDRI is from Poly Haven. This render was my first time using Natron for some of the compositing. The animation was rendered at 1080p with 1024 samples.
It’s rather a complex setup. I believe it would be easier to do this through geometry nodes now, but I have been working on this project for a while, so I didn’t bother converting it.
The technique is based off of a tutorial from Ray Mairlot about how to create a Lego fluid simulation from back in the 2.7X days. I applied the concepts from that tutorial, but used a smoke sim and volume-to-mesh modifier instead of a fluid sim. If want to do it this way, you can watch the video and then apply the modifications I mentioned, but if you’re just interested in roughly it works:
Create a smoke sim and export it as an OpenVDB sequence
Import it into your Blender scene (I think it needs to be an external OpenVDB sequence, it can’t just be a simulation you created in the same file. Or, at least that’s how it was when I first built the scene)
Add a random object, like a plane
Add a volume to mesh modifier to the plane
Add a boolean union modifier with some cubes to give the simulation a fixed “bounding box”
Add a remesh modifier set to “blocks”
Add a lattice to stretch the mesh into rectangular Lego-brick shapes instead of perfect cubes
Add a boolean intersect modifier to remove the first boolean cubes from view
Parent a Lego brick to the plane and set it to use dupliverts, or “Vertices” under the “Instancing” section in the object menu
Here is the “Behind the Scenes” article for this brilliant artwork!
Do check out this article, written by the artist themself. It describes the step-by-step process of creating the artwork and provides insight into brick-ified smoke simulation in Blender.
