Lego scenes with KeyShot

Daniele Boldi Cotti breaks down the KeyShot rendering techniques behind his fun
Lego scene

First of all I would like to say thanks to the 3D Total Team to give me a chance to write this
‘making of' article.

The inspiration for this personal project emerged when, after a day googling lego mini-figures, I found out this really interesting page on flickr.com made by Vesa Lehtimaki. She creates wonderful pictures of Lego mini-figures - so I thought, why don't do something similar in 3D? The day after I started to play with
Lego again...

Modeling

First of all I downloaded and installed the free software Leocad that allows you to create and customize scenes with Lego bricks. The layout of the software is pretty easy to learn, on the right hand side you have a big library where you can drag what you want and drop in your scene.

Playing with Lego in Leocad

Playing with Lego in Leocad

Once all the Legos were in the scene, I just exported a 3DS format (I know it's not the best format in the world but for now it doesn't allow to export a better format) and imported it into 3ds Max.

Exporting the scene as a 3DS file

Exporting the scene as a 3DS file

Importing the scene into 3ds Max

Importing the scene into 3ds Max

The plan was to render out the scene in KeyShot, which is great for design products and it permits you to create photorealistic 4000 renders in just few minutes. A requisite to render in KeyShot is that the geometry has to be nice (I.e. quads), otherwise you will have some nasty artefacts. For this reason, once I imported the mesh from Leocad to 3ds max I quickly remodeled more or less any singular piece starting from primitive geometry like Box, Cylinder, sphere
and plan.

Remodeling the singular pieces

Remodeling the singular pieces

Once the mesh was done I was ready to reassemble my mini-figures and create my own scene. Just to be sure about the position of the geometry I imported the photo I took in Wimbledon Park as background, into 3ds Max.

Importing a photo to help position the geometry

Importing a photo to help position the geometry

Once I was satisfied with everything I exported my scene straight to KeyShot using a useful plug-in you can download. This plug-in permits you to export and open immediately your 3D model in KeyShot and keep the objects separated, which isn't possible when you export, for example, an OBJ.

Exporting the scene directly into KeyShot

Exporting the scene directly into KeyShot

Camera setting

Once the 3D model was in KeyShot I imported the photo I took in Wimbledon park as the background and I more or less matched it with the same view I created previously in 3ds Max.

Lighting

For the lighting I used a standard exterior HDR from the KeyShot Library because the atmosphere and background were pretty similar to my photo. Once in the scene I just played with Brighten and Rotation for a bit to get the
best result.

Using a HDR from the KeyShot library

Using a HDR from the KeyShot library

Materials

KeyShot has a good photorealistic material library. This time I just customized different type of plastics by changing colors and the Specular levels.

Adding the plastic materials

Adding the plastic materials

Rendering

Once satisfied with the scene (lighting, materials and camera angle) I rendered out two different passes, beauty and AO. The beauty pass was saved, including the alpha channel to help me later with the compositing. Obviously if you have background and foreground separated, it is much easier to compose them in After Effects or Photoshop.

To render out the image at 3000 resolution, I used the default rendering setting. It's almost never necessary to set it up differently because the standard setting is already pretty nice and fast.

The beauty pass

The beauty pass

The AO pass

The AO pass

Compositing

The post-production phase was pretty simple as when I use KeyShot as rendering engine I usually don't need to do much post-work. Here below you can see the AE comp. When the render was complete I merged the backplate, AO and beauty passes together and played in AE with level and curves just to give a bit more contrast and reality to the image. As a final effect I imported a bokeh photo effect I previously downloaded from Google, desaturated it, and changed the blending mode to screen by playing with the opacity.

Compositing the scene

Compositing the scene

And that's it! Here is the final image.

Related Links:

Take a look at Daniele's other work
Check out another KeyShot tutorial by Daniele
Stuck on using 3ds Max? Try our books

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