Looks pretty cool! In fact it's almost a little too perfect. Is there a way to snap the y-axis movement to the nearest plate thickness? You know, to make it look more like actual plate pieces are being stacked on top of each other one by one to raise and lower the height.

At 4:57 of this video, there's a teaser for a new 30+ Minute film I'm making. You can see that I did keying for the big white spaceship, but in the film there's going to be quite a few aerial shots. Would you guys think that I should build it in LDD and then animate it like that? I think that then I could avoid bad keying, (Because I suck at it) and I could do camera moves in the air and such. What do you guys think? Should I do that or deal with the hassle of filming that giant ship against a green screen and having bad keying problems?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSS10FAEkKI&t=12s

Your answer let me have a seconde look at my video and I have to agree. This could be solved. Increment in z position with one third of brick height is possible by applying a remesh modifier set to block.

What part of it is CGI?

If all: wow, good job. I like the main character most.

Only the overall red tint seems a little bit strange to me. I know it should look like a dessert, but there might be other solutions.

Oh, it's really all CG? I first thought the trooper was greenscreened but now I see it. Good job it already looks very stop motion like.

Very good! Did you animate the storm trooper by setting the keyframe interpolation mode to Constant, and then for each frame move it just like irl, or did you use some other technique?

P.S. I really like those lens flares, good job!

The LEGO Movie effect.  The things we do to create realworld imperfections

Here's how I see it:

You can build a model in Stud.io, LDD, MLCAD, etc. but none of them will export to a format that Blender will recognize, unless you find a Blender plugin that supports it.

After importing, you may have to tweak each brick since, depending on the source you import from, the LEGO mesh may be a low-poly res quality.  I know MLCAD was like that years ago.  Tweaking can be increasing the poly res of the studs, making edges more prominent, texturing, bumpmapping, etc.  Rioforce, if I recall correctly, had shared some realistic Cycles shaders.

Now if you use the same piece in other models you plan to import later on, you have to tweak that same mesh again.

What I've done is build an asset library in Blender of pieces I've used and build the models in Blender.  Blender has a Ldr/dat import plugin that allows me to import MLCAD dat files, which are LEGO pieces.  I do still build on MLCAD or Stud.io, the latter to check for collisions in my builds.  I use the model as reference when I build in Blender.

You can use stud.io and export, use collada format.