Lego Hill Climb Announce

I did all the opening brick simulation, animation and rendering for this announcement trailer. Completed in 3DS Max using Tyflow for simulation work and time-dilation, and VRay for rendering. Lego components sourced from BrickLink Studio and rendered with displacement for stud logo and rounded edges to add nice edge highlights to the brick geometry. The full simulation was cached to Alembic after re-timing to make sure that motion blur would still work.

Part of the challenge, besides capturing the motion of falling bricks, was to achieve a realistic look for the Lego plastic and rubber components. Red is tricky to render at the best of times and Lego red is very saturated. I had to build a shader in VRay that had a very glossy primary specular, with a clear coat to catch some highlights from strategically placed area lights. The rubber and glass parts were fairly straightforward thanks to VRay’s comprehensive library of material templates. You can see the rounded edge shader at work here adding a nice specular kick and removing the hardness of the brick edges. The Lego logo on the stud tops was achieved with a normal map as opposed to geometry or displacement.

The client wanted a very clean look to the bricks, as if hot of the assembly line, so I didn’t make use of any grunge maps to vary the overall surface roughness. Even the final output had only a subtle amount of motion blur to keep the image clean.

This was one of the first renders sent to the client showing the selection of bricks chosen for the final simulation. It also had one of my earliest shading passes and very little changed beyond this besides a slight darkening of the red.