Sub Assembly 2 of the Lego Helicarrier 76042 coming tonight!

Well the weekend is here and finishing off the second Sub assembly of the Lego Helicarrier. It is more of a daunting task than it seems to do it completely digital. Here are some stats about the video coming today:

Modeled in Mecabricks 460 parts +Mecabricks
Built and animated in Blender 2.77a
733,692 vertices, 924,684 faces

12600 Frames in 720P

Rendered in the Sheepit Render Farm @SheepItRF +SheepIt RenderFarm

CPU Render time 10,917 hours total
Real duration thanks to the cloud 131.46 hours

Will have it up tonight for your enjoyment. In this one I learned a lot about moving the camera trying to smooth things out for the video. Started out with complex path constraints and NURBS pathing and ended up with a much simpler solution after randomly seeing some kids playing tetherball on a playground while driving here in Nairobi.

Let me know what you think when you see it.

Chris

Lego Helicarrier (Kit 76042) Sub Assembly 01 Build Video

Hi again everyone, I have posted the video of the first sub-assembly of the Lego Helicarrier 76042 Kit. The idea is to show each of the sub-assemblies being built followed up when it is complete by what is hopefully a very cool short film.




The meshes and frameworks are built in Mecabricks, LDD, and Ldraw. While the final modeling, materials, and textures along with the animation are done entirely in Blender 2.77.

Below are a couple shots in the process:

Lego Avengers FlightOps (Lego Kit 76042)

Hey folks on the heels of the build video here is a little animation of the Lego Avenger fighters doing flight ops. Enjoy, and subscribe to get my posts and videos as they come out.







Built and animated entirely in Blender 2.77.

Lego Avengers FlightOps (Lego Kit 76042)

Hey folks on the heels of the build video here is a little animation of the Lego Avenger fighters doing flight ops. Enjoy, and subscribe to get my posts and videos as they come out.







Built and animated entirely in Blender 2.77.

Lego Helicarrier Fighters Build Video (Lego Kit 76042)

Here is the video of the small fighters for the Lego Helicarrier. She is still under construction. At over 3000 parts the animation and rendering is a bit daunting but it is on the way, enjoy this in the meantime!
Don't forget to checkout my other posts below or in the archive.



All my videos are in HD check your settings if it looks grainy.

You can pick up the Lego Kit here:

So yesterday I was looking at a rendering I did of the mini fighters. (See Previous post). The photo I posted looks great but when I rendered the first 900 frames of the build animation I ran into problems with the lighting.

In the scene I am using an HDR lighting setup that replicates a studio setup (check it out if your not using HDR, makes lighting a snap). The problem was that as I played the video it appeared as if the lighting was flickering.

Doing some research online I found that it was most likely due to all of the reflective surfaces in the scene.

Here is a link to the article that solved the problem:

BenderGuru - 7ways to get rid of fireflies

It was not a firefly problem but changing three of the settings fixed the "flickering"

1. The HDRI map resolution is now set to 512 in Blender (Changed to 1024)

2. In Light Paths, increased Filter Glossy to 0.50

3. Increased the samples to 1500 from 1250

This solved my issue but what I cannot figure out is it tripled the file size of the PNG frames (Resolution was unchanged at 720P and no compression changes.)

Shout out to @andrewpprice of blenderguru.com whose tutorials and lighting discussions really work.

Lego Helicarrier Fighters Build Still Image (Lego Kit 76042)

Good Morning folks, posting a little teaser of what is to come. The Avengers are arriving. Finished up the models today and working on some animation. These little micros are waiting for somewhere to call home. The Helicarrier should be coming out of dry dock soon.

You can get the kit here: