As June winds down, I find myself reminiscing about writing month’s program. 34 years later, I still remember the glow of the TV as it lit the notebook in my lap. Although I have fond memories of Tic-tac-toe, time isn’t as kind to it. Let’s dig in.
Each month I check to see what the latest LEGO mini build is. Since I don’t have a local LEGO Store, I often build and render them using virtual bricks. This month, I only needed to render it as as mathieub already built it. Yet, I decided to give it a little character.
One of the first things I saw when I arrived in Idaho were colorful balloons floating across the brown desert and blue skies. A defining moment that I’ve carried with me for the almost 20 years I’ve lived here. So, when I came across Visionary Bricks’ hot air ballon I had the perfect picture in mind.
Last weeks, I ran across this build by changewing1 of the living planet. Mecabricks is a great community for such finds. Plus, I needed something to tax my old computer while trying out denoising feature in Blender. Stars aligned—pun intended, and I was off to render my next image. Keep reading to see how I did it.
The lively colors in this Duplo ostrich caught my eye and inspired me to render it. My version of this lonely ostrich uses standard LEGO bricks, I was never a big fan of Duplo, nor do I have models of them. Yet, the simplicity of the model is quite effective. The render recreates that charm well.
I saw a great Pirate Ship render yesterday by saabfan. The water in it impressed me, and I had commented that I didn’t know how to model it in Blender. Scrubs informed that it was easy, providing me the how. Off I went to try for myself.
I spent part of the memorial weekend getting Blender working on my office computer, a 2011 Mac mini. Although not as fast as my laptop, I’d set up dual monitors a few months ago and was itching to use them. The result of my effort is this render of 6600 Police Patrol.
Okay, although not the worst ever, Dice Game is pretty dull. With only two dice, no strategy, and no replay value, you might think this an odd program of the month. But for the young teenager that wrote it, it was pretty cool in 1983. Let’s dig in and see why.
Although it’s been a month since my last LEGO® post, I haven’t been idle. With my current workflow, it only takes about 15 minutes to kick off a render, but I often don’t have the time to blog them. Correcting that with a few spare minutes, here are my last ten Blender renders.
Foreign to many developers today, I have a notepad and binder full of ideas from my ZX81 days. The notepad contains early program snippets. In contrast, I have sketches and designs crammed into a binder. Flipping through it, I landed on a Star Wars sketch that became the basis for this month’s program.