Inspiration flows from various sources. For some time I’ve wanted to create a messy model, one with greebles and imperfections. A space article about a moon—I don’t remember which—provided the push I needed. With Frank Sinatra’s In Other Words playing in my head, I headed over to Mecabricks and started building.
When I ran across Iain Heath's Brick-moji, there was this instant need to build them myself. My wife thought they were cute, which was enough for me. Not long afterwards, I had my first render of the face with its tongue sticking out and tears of joy.
Inspiration and Milk Trucks.It was sheer luck that I found my latest build. Searching for a LEGO sticker set, I happened across this Milk Truck. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to render it. As Ive mentioned before, I’m a sucker for old LEGO sets, although I like modern ones too. Lucky or otherwise, there is a method to my madness. Join me for a few minutes and learn the fives ways I discover new models to render.
Meandering around Flickr, I ran across a picture of Floating cube houses Havneby Rømø island Denmark by Arkitema Architects. With black walls and expansive glass windows, the design was striking. Inspired by the modern lines, I pictured how they might look in LEGO bricks. Below is the result of me acting on that inspiration.
I continue to grow my skills in Mecabricks and, to a smaller extend, Blender. When I ran across What's missing? A New Hope on BrickSet, the Yavin IV model depicted intrigued me. Doing some research into the unreleased set, it ultimately led me to render my own version of it.
I follow a number of LEGO sites through RSS feeds, looking for inspiration on what to render next. A long time back, I booked marked this article, Build the Big E Cow. It was small, had instructions, and was kind of cute. Something my wife would like. I booked marked the site, thinking someday I’d get back to it. I finally did.
Hard to believe, but 20 years ago I started dabbling with POV-Ray to render models with virtual LEGO bricks. Set 373, my second rendered model, is over 20 years old now. Started in April of 1996, it’s seen many iterations over the years. This month I decided to build it once more—this time using Mecabricks and Blender.
This is the LEGO bricks puzzle panda from the “What is it?” section of “Bricks and Pieces,” Spring 1975. I solved the puzzle in LDD years ago, originally rendering it in POV-Ray. For this remake, I thought it’d be fun to import into Mecabricks and render again in Blender.
I’ve been a long time Star Trek fan, predating Star Wars by a few years. I have fond memories of watching the original series in re-runs, but it was TNG that rekindled my fandom. I even went to a convention while living in Indy. So, it should be no surprise that I built a version of the Enterprise D using only basic LEGO bricks. This is the story of my attempts at rendering it.
When I first created my Mini ZX81, I had modeled a Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS1000) as well. My intent was always to render them together, but other projects kept getting in the way. Finally getting back to it last week, the results came out better than I expected.
Up until now, all my Mecabricks work has been from me importing models. Sure, I’d tweaked a few pieces here and there, as I noted in my last post. Yet, I was still designing them in LDD and exporting them to render in Blender. LEGO model 352 is my first attempt at building something only in Mecabricks.
I’m still messing around with Mecabricks. Originally modeled in LDD and rendered in POV-Ray, this is the Blender version. It’s shiny! I like the lighting, but would have preferred to put a nice sky like I did in the first version. Perhaps I should go hunt down some Blender tutorials and figure out how to do that. Maybe later. For now, the model looks great with its realistic bricks.
Since 1995, I’ve been rendering LEGO models using POV-Ray. For most of that time, I’ve used scripting to place and build those models. It’s been fun and I’ve learned a lot over the years, each model looking a bit better than the first. That said, I’m never quite happy and always looking for new ways to render my models and, below, are my recent attempts using Blender.