Main Contents
January 29, 2008
As most of you know it was Lego’s 50th birthday yesterday. So a belated happy birthday Lego - I did nothing of interest related to that unfortunately. Instead I listed a few weird animals and got on with my day. It’s not that I didn’t care I just lacked the means of doing anything worthwhile for it. Unlike Joel Johnson (BoinBoing’s gadget editor) who created this lovely timelapse video of himself building the ultimate collectors edition Millennium Falcon. So if you’ve got three minutes to spare enjoy watching the process.
Filed under: Lego, Videos |
Comments (0)
December 12, 2007
tsk tsk - those nicey nice Lego minifigs are up to no good :)
Filed under: Lego, The Good Shite |
Comments (0)
November 7, 2007
Enough of the digital Lego stuff, here’s some real Lego. I ordered this Sub and my Scout and the pieces arrived yesterday. The full pics are available here: My Gallery where I will post all Lego stuff.
So quite happy with how they look and that all the pieces fit as they did in the digital designer. Neat! Now onto more ambitious things I guess… that or more practice :)
Filed under: Lego, The Good Shite |
Comments (0)
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 |
Comments (0)
November 3, 2007
So I played with Bricksmith, and LDraw editor, this weekend and digitally recreated one of my favourite classic space Lego models. Eventhough before I mentioned that Bricksmith wasn’t all it could be, the experience wasn’t too harrowing and quite pleasant. Granted, it’s slower than playing Lego Digital Designer, and definitely slower than real Lego. But I think the results are rather pleasing :) There’s a Voyager Rear view available too :)For those interested, the LDraw file was rendered in Mega POV Ray, a port of POV Ray to the Mac that works (the original POV Ray GUI crashes). The pov file was generated using L3P with the following command line options:
Front view:
l3p -b -f -cg10,50,-10 -q3
Rear view:
l3p -b -f -cg10,130,-10 -q3
Filed under: Lego, The Good Shite |
Comments (0)
October 29, 2007
Here I show ya mah medium class scout ship. Suitable for mid range reconnaissance. A fast and highly maneuverable ship capable of outrunning most attack ships.
So I pummeled this little beast together yesterday and today ordered it and my remote control unmanned submarine. With the custom packaging the two items will take 17days to ship. that’s not entirely bad really.. pretty cool if you ask me. I look forward to getting them delivered. It’s probably the first and last time I order the custom packaging as I understand the strain it puts on the environment.
Meanwhile I am still on the lookout for a decent LDraw modeller for the Mac. I used LeoCAD on parallels yesterday and was reasonably pleased with its ability to ’snap’ parts. It’s not entirely true snapping like LDD (Lego digital designer) but at least it places pieces on top of one another when you place them in the same spot. Bricksmith is a lovely app for OS X, but it has no idea about intersecting pieces and its view-port rotation and general interaction isn’t all that comfortable. Where LeoCAD is more like Maya in the way you manipulate pieces, Bricksmith isn’t. However Bricksmith is open source, and if I could be bothered I could improve on it. On the other hand, there’s also the possibility to port LeoCAD…. the question is though if I can make enough time to bother with it, or do I just use parallels and be done with it?
Filed under: Lego |
Comments (1)
October 24, 2007
This rather unfortunate collection of lego is the result of a quick play around in Lego Digital Designer last night. Having has a few beers and failing miserably at R-Type III (god that game’s hard), I decided to do something marginally more constructive and here is the result.
I also realised how “out of shape” my lego skills are…. I do think I need to practice more. No news on the LDD->Maya front… I tried to export this model to LDD and a whole host of missing part errors came up. What bugs me is that there’s a limited amount of parts in the designer too. Which means I am unable to recreate the classic Lego I used to have. Real shame… Really is. I may need to check in the brick shop and see what they have there. Apparently there’s a decent place somewhere in Richmond… like a Lego Pick’n'Mix ;) Next stage is to make Lego Hawkin
Filed under: Lego |
Comments (0)
October 10, 2007
Time. That’s what I’m talking about. Where has it gone indeed. The last thing I remember was posting about the warning sign off Oxford Street and now it’s over a week later… or two. Hell, I’ve even lost count there. But I’m back [for now] with something a bit spooooooooky. Well, to me it is, to you perhaps not. Remember those insect drones we all dread. They made a cameo appearance in Deception Point (trashy Dan Brown book) and are generally used for covert espionage… no? Well have a look at this then. Apparently spotted in Washington these little beasties have made their way into the general public. Yuck. I also wonder what the implications are of swallowing one of these when cycling along. Bugs are gross enough, but at least they’re biological matter. I’m not sure how my intestines would deal with something like that.
What else we got today? How about a taste of Scotland????
You got to love that headline really. I don’t think I’ve ever kicked anything that hard. Ever. I’m not sure who got hurt more in the end… But he’s a real brave one isn’t he? Taking his chances with a burning man.
So hopefully I’ll get round to posting some more Lego related stuff, but it’s been a bit quiet on that front since I discovered the Lego Digital Designer, as it does pretty much what I want. I think the next stage is to really figure out how to get it all into Maya (or some other decent 3D package) and make some nice renders from it.
Filed under: Lego, The Bad Shite |
Comments (0)
September 10, 2007
Some time ago I posted about modelling Lego in Maya and said that it’d be cool to re-make that plugin for Maya as an opensource tool. Now I discover that the Lego Digital Designer, freely available over at Lego for both Windows and OS X, pretty much does that. Well not exactly. It does the snapping and all that but it isn’t Maya. What it does do however is save out to LDraw format. See where I am going with this? With some patience and work you can create a LDD (Lego digital designer) scene, save it to LDraw, convert it to OBJ, then import it to Maya and render away. It should work. It can work.I just need to iron out the procedure to do this so it’s more of a click, click thing rather than type, type, type, set, check, fail, re-do etc thing :)
Will keep you posted!
Filed under: Lego, The Good Shite |
Comments (0)
August 30, 2007
In my quest of finding a way to model Lego in Maya I found something rather interesting. The image there is made my a certain Carsten Lind who is a 3D graphics artist from Denmark. He was lucky enough to use Lego’s own Maya plugin called EBT. EBT is a tool will let you model Lego toys in Maya. Rumor has it (and please note I have no confirmation on this) that this tool will also snap the bricks to one another in the correct, Lego, way. It’s this bit that piqued my curiosity. So far I have not found a tool that actually restricts the modeling process in a realistic manner. There’s no intersection tests, there’s no “you can’t place this piece onto this piece like that” check. Nada. You place a piece in your scene and it’s up to you to position the brick how it should be.
So when I heard this I had to investigate. So far I have found nothing aside from the details from Carsten Lind’s site. How infuriating. I want that tool… or something like it. So perhaps it’s time to get down to business, convert the LDraw library to a Maya format, make a parts browser plugin for Maya, and then write a plugin that will let you do what this EBT does. It may be possible. It may happen. We’ll keep you posted my friends!
Filed under: Lego, The Good Shite |
Comments (0)
