Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
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I have recently created a LDD to Maya script so I could start doing brickfilms in Maya. Only problem is since I don't have access to LEGO's brick library I have been having to model all of them myself. Finally got enough bricks modeled to show some tests off! 
It's not much but I'm pretty happy right now.
(Bonus points if you can figure out what rendering software was used 
)
Mentalray? Great work with that script. No idea how you're doing this, but you have to model every brick yourself!? Can you use a function to at least generate the basic bricks and plates so you don't have to model each of those manually?
Well I actually lied I'm not completely modeling from scratch I'm starting with ldraw bricks, but they tend to have really janky topology so I (in most cases) completely redo them using the base to keep the scale accurate. For the basic plates, tiles and bricks I made a tool that would extend the brick duplicate the studs and the tubes and then group it all together, so I could take a starting 2x2 for example and create all 2x bricks from that. I'm now getting into more unique bricks that don't really have mathematical relations to other bricks so I'm having to do them one by one as opposed to in mass. Once the brick is modeled I then uv unwrap it and make a high poly version to bake normal maps so I can get the LEGO logo, and the bevels on the edges with out spending faces on it. Once all that is done the I set the brick's pivot, and rotation to match where LDD has it, the brick is then placed at 0,0,0 and is exported as an obj and put in a library that the script calls from. It's quite a process but it's really rewarding each time I finish a brick to see it get imported and then rendered!
That is an impressive start. I dabbled a little in 3D animation a bit ago but making the bricks usable was such a pain. It's cool to see the quality of your script. Do I understand this write that your script replaces the LDD models with higher quality designs that you created mostly manually?
So from LDD you can export an .lxfml file, this file is basically a text file that contains all of the information about the model, what bricks are used, what colors they are, what their transforms are. My script reads the lxfml file, imports and places bricks from my library (which is populated by bricks I have set up/modeled manually) and assigns the brick with the correct material that is also made via the script based on the lxfml file, as well as some options given to the user of the script: (Arnold vs Redshift vs Blinn material, normal maps for the logo and bevels on or off, and dirt/dings on the bricks can also be toggled).
I'm not showing off the dirt part though as my current dirt maps look terrible and completely unrealistic, and still needs to be messed with.
If you'd like I can send you a copy of the script to look at. Since I'm using a student version of Maya I'm pretty sure I can't sell any of this work even if there was a market, so I was planning on making it open source at some point anyway.
Edit: btw @aquamorphproductions I'm not sure if you noticed, but I'm using your face decal on the mermaid, I credited you on the youtube video itself, but just wanted to say thanks here as well!
Brandon, yeah that's what I meant to ask. This sounds great, I'm super excited for this project!
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