Character Contest-Winner Breakdown

Lego Destroyer

By: Hamzah Khan

I’ve always liked lego and so I recently decided to make a lego character for Blendmaster’s competition. First I googled for blueprints of minifigures. Based exactly off these measurements I quickly modelled. 

The only challenge in this stage was the arms and the hands. Those aren’t exactly to scale. The reason I did most of it to precise scale is that in past attempts to make lego, my lego looked like it was a cheap knockoff and not actually lego. 

The reason for this was that subtle mistakes in size due to me simply guessing sizes all added up ruining the look of the minifigure. 

Final minifigure model. Excluding armour helmet and gun.

The main blueprints I used:

UV unwrapping was easy as it was all simple modelling. I made his mouth in gimp and moved on to make the rest of his body. The body shader had a few redundant nodes but I felt it did its job and did not bother changing it.

Afterwards I needed to create lego bricks for the characters environment. While I did not get blueprints online, I did however get the dimensions for the brick online and did the simple modelling to those dimensions. I uv unwrapped only the cylindrical top piece to add the lego logo onto it.

Next I used the blender rigid body simulator to quickly make mounds of lego bricks. To do this all I did was duplicate the bricks then create a plane beneath. Rigid body did the rest.

Next I used one of my hdris to light up the scene. I also adjusted the colour of the hdri.

Lego minifigure shader

Through testing I realized that a ordinary pile of bricks would be too boring, so I decided to add glows to it. Using UV spheres with emission I managed to achieve that glow.

Next I duplicated the minifigure’s body parts to create the heads and arms that were in the scene. I also created armor, a gun and a helmet for my minifigure. Then I got fire textures online to quickly add fire to the scene. I made the fires rotate and added motion blur. There were 2 sets of fires. The fires next to the glowing uv spheres and the fires right at the front of the scene.

I also added a sunset background and I was ready to render. Lastly I did a quick bit of compositing (only in blender). 

Final Render: