Modeling Lego can be tricky.  Not only are there all those raised bumps (called “Studs”, I think), for a photo-realistic render, you want to reveal all of those minute seams between each brick.  Add to that the glossy, and somewhat, reflective surfaces and it’s already sounding like a pretty big hill to climb.

Now if you love Lego as much as I do, you might consider embarking on such as crazy journey, but if you’re smart (and I know you are ;-), then you are probably asking yourself, “Hasn’t somebody already done this?”.  Of course, the answer is “Yes”.  Better still, someone has even built a CAD-style program to build everything with and a community supported library of Lego pieces.

A while ago, I stumbled on a few such programs.  I eventually  settled on the one I liked the most and have used it to rebuild all of my long-lost childhood Lego kits and more.

Here’s a couple models I put together using one such freeware program called MLCAD v3.20.

The designs are from existing LEGO kits and are not my own.  Although you can probably still get the instructions to build the X-Wing Fighter from www.lego.com, the blue space cruiser is from the 70’s and was my first lego kit I got when I was just a wee lad. The X-Wing model is missing a few pieces on the far/top engine as well as R2D2 (you can see the space behind the cockpit where he is supposed to go).

To get the instructions, I went to www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory where you can find instruction booklets for almost every LEGO kit ever made.

Both were rendered with a freeware renderer called POV-Ray for Windows
version 3.5
http://www.povray.org/

In a later post I will detail how I converted the space cruiser LDR model file as an OBJ file and brought it into Maya to setup and animate the ship coming in for a landing.

Like I said, fun!