November 5, 2007
So you saw my POVRay rendered pic of the Voyager ship. Not too bad eh? The problem is that it’s hard to gain control over materials and the like without editing the pov file manually. Would be nice to get something a little more familiar to work in. As readers probably know I’ve been wondering about modelling Lego in Maya and so far haven’t got a solution for it. But now I do have a solution for at least rendering in Maya. Yay! So first off you will need a windows machine for the process. I use Parallel’s desktop for this purpose. You will need to download LdrDat2OBJ which converts LDraw files to OBJ files. I had some problems with missing LDraw parts at first but then just copied the PARTS and P folder from my Mac to the Windows side. It seems that some parts are named differently or missing between the two versions. Once done load up LdrDat2OBJ and fill in all the required fields. Hit convert and sit back. Shortly after you will have an OBJ file to import into Maya.
So I took the OBJ to work and tried it out. One thing I did notice is that the import doesn’t work too well in Maya 7.0.1 but I know that it works great in Maya 2008. The differences are that in 7.0.1 you only get one material for the object, whereas in 2008 you get a material for every differently coloured part. This allows you to tweak and colour your model correctly. See the result of a quick and dirty final gather render with mental ray:
You’ll notice that it is missing the ‘lego’ bumpmap on top of the studs. Plus there’s some iffy shading on the nose cone. But I guess you can address all that. In the post below you can see the over shiny POVRay renders. Perhaps I can tweak the files to reduce the shininess of the plastic in the POVRay renders.
Filed under: Apple, Lego, The Good Shite |
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August 20, 2007
I used to love Lego when I was much younger. I had a reasonable collection of space Lego and back then I even managed to make my own reasonably cool space ships. Well they were cool in my young opinion. I’m not sure how they would look to me now though. So I was thinking of doing some more Lego after I saw Soren’s Lego creations on flickr. I just thought they were so darn good I must get some Lego and get back into it… This is where I hit a few snags. The first one being that I don’t actually have any Lego any more - I think I may have some somewhere in the world I’m not sure. The second is that I don’t really have space for the amount of Lego required to make custom items and besides, collecting the pieces you need to make a specific item you have in mind will take quite some time. So I thought about the digital domain. I remembered LDraw from some time ago and thought I’d start there. Sure enough it’s supported on OS X and there’s even quite a few tools available for the Mac that go with it. So I did some research and found Bricksmith which allows you to make your virtual Lego models. Then you can use L3P to convert the LDraw files to POV-Ray files. So what I have now is a complete set of tools to take the virtual Lego from model/design to 3D render. Best of all it’s all opensource too :) - But if someone is reading this who knows how to export LDraw to Maya comptiable files, please let me know!!
Bricksmith takes a while to get used to and I was hoping that the tools would have a “stick this brick to this brick” feature. Unfortunately you just have to align the bricks to the best of your ability and make sure that they are positioned as they would be in real life. I have yet to try the official Lego creator software to see how good that is. The advantage is that it is “official” plus you can upload your creations and order the parts straight off. So no lengthy process of making a list and then searching for and ordering the parts from the Lego website. The other problem is that apparently the Lego creator does not support as many bricks as LDraw does, as it will most likely support only the bricks available from Lego at the moment (also not bad as you know you can get them then), whereas LDraw will support all bricks (or at least most of them) from past to present. It is up to you to source the parts though should you wish to actually build you design.
So expect some renders of the miniatures I am in the process of making. I have a few ideas but I have to see which will come to fruition and which won’t.
Filed under: Apple, Lego, The Good Shite |
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You’ll notice that it is missing the ‘lego’ bumpmap on top of the studs. Plus there’s some iffy shading on the nose cone. But I guess you can address all that. In the post below you can see the over shiny POVRay renders. Perhaps I can tweak the files to reduce the shininess of the plastic in the POVRay renders.