Quote:
Originally Posted by TwiiK 
The wall on the right is made from 2x1 bricks where the stud and the base is connected into one mesh. This creates this nice highlight where the two meet. The wall on the left is made from 1x1 chamfered bricks. The chamfered bricks don't play nicely with the light in my opinion. 
I think the bricks where both the stud and the cube are connected together and turbosmoothed look the best, but they are extremely poly intensive.  About 15k triangles per 1x1 brick.
I came here to ask how you modeled your bricks. I think I will go for the 1 mesh turbosmoothed version and see how big I can model before my computer crumples.
And also to ask how you did the "lego" text on each stud. Is it a bump map?
Also I remembered having seen a lego snowspeeder before and then I remembered it was this site: Snowspeeder tutorial
I bet you have seen that site, but if you haven't then here you go. There's a lot of tips there and cool stuff.
Edit: Also, what scale are you using for your bricks?
When I measured a 1x1 tall brick I found it to be 8mm x 8mm x apx. 9,5mm, and the stud apx. 2,5mm radius and apx. 1,5 mm high. Then when I remembered the bricks3d site I double checked my measurements and went with their measurements instead incase you were using the same measurements.
They use 8mm x 8mm x 9,6mm for a 1x1 tall brick and 2,5mm radius and 1,7mm height for the stud.
This way if anyone of us or anyone else ever want bricks or the whole library we're all using the same scale. |
First off, just want to say in advance that, sorry I can't be more helpful as It has been well over a year since I made the pieces, its only in the past week that I've come back to it and actually made something out of it, so Ill do my best to answer your questions :P
Bricks3d looks very familiar, im fairly certain I went there and was inspired from it to make the pieces.
The one mesh bricks you made definetely look fantastic to me, the area where the stud meets the brick creates a really nice effect that adds alot of realism to it I think, without that highlight the bricks don't look as convincing.
My bricks were just simple chamfered boxes, with chamfered cylinders on top. I think what your doing looks
alot better and I wish I had done that at the beginning. 15k for a 1x1 is definetely a monkey load of triangles. With the chamfered bricks I have, they are 982 triangles each, which is much more manageable but your sacrificing that nice highlight you have going. If you have the comp for it, I would go with the mesh bricks, they look a tonne better and more realistic side-by-side and I am tempted to go back and redo my library using that technique. Its just the poly count thats the main issue, especially with big models. I calculated that if I had used the turbosmooth mesh instead of the chamfer, my snowspeeder would be around 2.5million triangles.
Is there anyway you can get the turbosmooth triangle count down? Its definetely the better choice but the triangle count is turning me off using it myself.
In terms of scaling, Ive double-checked this and my 1x1 bricks are 8 x 8 x 9,6, and the studs are 2.5r and 1.5h, the same as what Bricks3D has, and very similiar to your measurements. I think that, when I made some of the pieces by combining two 1x1's, and then two 2x1's etc etc, the scaling was lost a bit, as often when I was assembling the models the pieces and studs werent lined up, and I had to to do a bunch of scaling to make them fit relatively accurately. You can't really tell from the renders, but alot of the identical pieces you see are slightly different sizes as I had to try and make them fit. Its not a big deal to me or anything, the main thing is that no one can tell you've done it and I think thats about right
For the Lego text the method I used was probably not the best way, but it got the job done. I first tried to create a spline out of text, but I found the text didn't look right, so I ended up drawing each letter individually with splines and extruding them out, then chamfering. Like I said, probably not the best way, a bump map might be better but I didn't really know how to do that at the time, don't really know now either lol, not too familiar with making bump maps.
Hope that helps,
Cheers
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