Lego Star Wars Snowspeeder and X-wing

[Lanceafer]

I am not ashamed to admit that I still love legos and whenever I pass them at the store I think wouldn’t that be fun... I might have to get into my parents attic and see if I can find mine to model some parts. It would give me a good excuse to play with them again anyway.


Great job on the models and textures. Are the textures done in Max or VRay?

[mallwine]

I am 34 and I have a ton of lego's and every once in a while I pull them out and play with them. But I have a reason now to keep them. I plan on giving them to my son when he is old enough, it will be a while cause he is only 15 months old right now.

[sbcarshops]

I still buy and build Legos....

[OzziGuy]

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

__________________

[TwiiK]

You've helped more than enough already.

As for using turbosmooth I'm sure you can get it down quite a bit as I was using 3 iterations, You could probably get away with using only 1 or 2 iterations if you chamfered as well as added edge loops. That would dramatically reduce the amount of tris per brick.

Also, what I failed to mention is that you can probably easily join the stud and the brick without using turbosmooth by just using booleaning the stud from the brick, cleaning it up a bit and welding them back together. I might try that out today. That should also give you that highlight along the seam.

I'm thinking I will make a base version, a turbosmoothed version and a chamfered version of every piece I make and them put them together into one big library to host somewhere in the end. I think that will be neat for everyone.

Also, doing some of the more complex lego pieces with turbosmooth is probably quite hard and should provide a very nice modelling practice as well.

Seeing how methodical I am as a modeler all the grid aligning and measuring involved with these lego pieces fits me like a glove, I love it.

[TwiiK]

Haha, this is so awesome.

Thanks for giving me this idea, I'm enjoying this alot.

I did another test comparing the 3 different methods I mentioned. I also did some color tests comparing the legos on my desk with the screen.


The back row are the base bricks, the middle row are the chamfered ones and the front row are the turbosmoothed ones. Things I've found out:

- If you do add an edge loop across the middle of the brick you can get away with 2 iterations of turbosmooth which will reduce the poly count drastically
- Also, to get the seam with the chamfered version just select the stud of the brick, clone it, scale it up and move it down until the chamfer sits where the seam should be and delete the top and side of the scaled stud. I've done this in the test above and it looks great.

I also did a google search for lego dimensions and found this: LUGNET News : ~330/FAQ/Build/dimensions

Quick reference:

Stud diameter: 5.0mm
Brick height: 9.6mm
1x1 Brick width: 8.0mm
Plate height: 3.2mm
Stud height: 1.7mm
Brick wall thickness: 1.5mm

From what I can tell those are either official dimensions or at the very least the widely accepted dimensions. They are the ones I use at the moment. Also, it's worth mentioning that the studs shrink some in diameter if you turbosmooth them so I make the turbosmoothed studs 2,75mm in radius. That makes them 4,98mm in diameter after the turbosmooth.

I realize I'm taking this a bit more serious than I should, but who cares?

PS: Did you know the actual dimensions of a 1x1 brick is 7.985 mm x 7.985 mm x 9.582 mm to allow room for dust and dirt and ensure a better fit for the bricks, and that the precision tolerance of the machines making legos is 0.002mm?