My main use for Blender right now is rending short scenes of Lego models, as well as Lego spaceship scenes. I’m past the problem now of importing the meshes, but now I’m wondering how to make the Lego bricks more realistic. I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, because I’m asking more of a specific question than critique in general.
Anyway, here’s a still shot of two Lego minifigures in a room:
I know now that I should have used “set smooth” on those guys’ helmets and things, instead of a subsurf. I also know that better seams between the Lego bricks in the wall would help. But I’m interested in the textures of the bricks. This obviously does not look photorealistic. . . does anyone know how to give the bricks a more “plastic” feel? I’ve seen this done in other 3d programs, so there’s probably a way in Blender as well.
Don’t Lego bricks have the ‘LEGO’ logo raised on top of the circular nubs? I rendered this once in FormZ and used a bump map to get the effect. Don’t know the best way to achieve this in Blender. Any Blender heads out there got any ideas about how to do that without created millions of vertices?
AO shouldn’t add that much time to an image like that.
If you had particles or intense textures, maybe. But you’ve just got color, specularity, and reflections going on here. Give it a try on a 50% render, and see if you like it.
I’ve shrunk the image size down a little, and decided that using AO isn’t so bad. Here’s an approximate comparison of an actual photograph with my Blender scene:
Still not quite the same, but I think it’s getting closer.
Those whatever things they have in their backs seem to have ridges caused by subsurfing to a mesh with triangles. You could add a loop cut to the bottom to make all the triangles flat to avoid this, or join the tris to quads. Also remember you can use both setsmooth and subsurf at the same time.
Lego plastic is a bit reflective, as you have done yet. I dont know how have you set up the lights, but try to increase materials specularity to about .8 and hardness to 80, while using Blinn shader. I would use Oren-Nayar as difuse shader, lowering reflection and play with roughness…
Do you have subsurf on the floor? The bumps, or juts or how are those called should be beveled on the top. And play a bit more with the shader. Try to make in material nodes a combined one, as you can see in the photo, there is a strong specular reflection in the middle, and almost whole plane reflects something less.
