Building Legos

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Modelled and rendered in Maya with Mental Ray

I have been modelling Lego bricks in Maya. This is part of an my involvement at an attempt in the CG Society's FXWars challenge with a few colleagues. This month's theme is BrickWars, where we have to do some simulation of Lego bricks.

This render was done with Mental Ray in Maya. The shaders were all Maya's default Blinn shader. On top  of Global Illumination & Final Gather, I had a MR bokeh lens shader going on.

Building a simple Lego brick isn't simple at all. We can all quickly come up with a decent shape, or so I think. After I made a simple 2x4 brick, I started making 2x8, 2x16. After all that, I started stacking them together. This was when I got a shock.

The border of each brick ate into the next teeth. I got geometrical intersection. This is totally unacceptable, especially when we are going to prepare it for simulation. I had to redo the whole brick from scratch.

This time, I started by making instances of the basic shapes and stacking them on each other as instances and then modifying them so I can ensure that they fit. Then went into edge loops and welding cylinders (the teeth) to the main shape.

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