I’ve been having a lot of fun in May, rendering images and trying out some new techniques when I can. I’ve also been trying to learn Blender, work on decorations for old models, and try out new sites. Although still learning, here are four of the renders I made during the middle of the month.
I have some sort of fascination with code breaking. A byproduct of all the spy movies I watched as a kid. A friend of my would make spy cases with Lego’s, and I had to build my own of course. I had a wallet with home made credentials and so on. Code Searcher is a bit of a homage to those golden age gadgets of the 60s and 70s.
As May kicked off, I got to work finishing the decorations for set 6444 Outback Airstrip. Because I had a few different decorations to finish, I got distracted. That distraction was with a much older LEGO Airplane. Both renders gave me a chance to revisit motion blur in Blender.
Shifting from POV-Ray back to Blender, I'm playing around with Mecabricks again. Taking a break from blogging about images, I decided to shift my focus. During the last week of April, I decided to clean up models and make new decorations. The journey weaved a bit, starting with an old model, but ending with something new. Below are the results of that virtual trip.
When I was a child, I remember going over to a friends house and playing Wizardry on his Apple. Leaving his house, I was super excited about the game I saw. Although my lowly ZX81 was no match, I had visions of creating my own games like it. My attempt, although a test, could have been so much more.
Following my Blender renders for 588, I started work on rendering the POV-Ray versions. Not quite the original versions, these renders use radiosity with an updated environment. Besides being a larger render, I turned on some of the features I usually don’t. The images came out pretty good, even if I’m always looking to improve them.
Last week, I shared my POV-Ray version of LEGO 590. Now, it seemed like a good time to build a Blender version. Starting in Mecabricks, I was fortunate to find that awesomo had recently built the model. Although missing a few parts, it gave me a shortcut into building a realistic render of the box art. Starting as a simple idea, my journey towards the final image wouldn’t be a straight one.
Not quite done trying things out, I spent time the futzing around with Blender the other night. Looking around for LEGO materials, I ran across a Blender importer for LDraw files. I didn’t know such a thing existed. Intrigued, it resulted in a night of experimentation and the results look pretty good.
On Monday, I decided to hack around with Blender a bit. I’d been playing with POV-Ray and looking for a way to convert my LEGO scenes to Blender. I was unable to export SDL to a mesh. Loading up LeoCad, I discovered that I could export my models and import them into Blender. Before I knew it, I’d spent the night futzing around with shaders and modifies. The results weren’t half bad.
Ah, can’t you smell sweet nostalgia of this LEGO set from 1979? One of my larger town sets as a child, 588 Police Headquarters was also one of the first ones I built in POV-Ray. Looking for something else, I ended decided to check if 588 was in Mecabricks. To my surprise, it wasn’t. This gave me two opportunities. The first to build the set again, and the second was to render it with Blender.