Cycles LEGO Materials

[rioforce]

Hi guys! I cooked up some Blender Cycles materials for all the LDraw types of materials. If you'd like to see them, click below. :)

http://rioforce.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/lego-materials-in-blender-cycles/

[MetallianFR68]

CYCLES materials in LDR-Importer is really a great improvement.
Thanks to the people involved in this new feature.

However, the result seems not 100% realistic to me on the BASIC bricks.
They are less "glossy" than in reality

I achieved better results using this tutorial
http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=82225
Check the Material LIBRARY : https://www.dropbox.com/s/2cvfqb7mlk26osd/Materials_cycles.blend
Something in LDR Importer can perhaps be improved using their method.

Just an idea

[Banbury]

I disagree. Real world bricks (at least mine) aren't all that 'polished'. The bricks in these images look more like metal.

[rioforce]

@Banbury , Are you referring to the bricks in my blog post, or the ones in MetallianFR68's comment? Obviously, with better lighting and beveling and such, they would look better.

@MetallianFR68 Those bricks do not look like plastic. I did an informal "study" (if you could call it that) on LEGO brick materials over the summer, and LEGO bricks have a lot less gloss than people often render. Most people like to make them really glossy, because it makes it look like shiny plastic, but they forget to take into account a bump map, which gives it a less glossy look. Instead of using bump maps, though, I just added Roughness to the Glossy node to simulate it.

On another note, when I try to import other types of colors of bricks (exported from LeoCad such as Chrome, Milky, etc.) they always come up as Basic, not as the node setup in the script, so I couldn't fix the rest of the materials according to my blog post. Maybe it as LeoCad, I do not know. Maybe you can check it out, Banbury. :)

[Banbury]

I was talking about MetallianFR68's links. Your materials look really good.

And I'm not interested in LeoCAD ...

[rioforce]

Thanks, I'm glad you like my materials. :)

I wasn't saying I like LeoCad, I just said that he proper materials didn't import. They imported as Basic. I don't have MLCad (or another one of those), so I just used LeoCad and exported as LDR. It might have been LeoCad not properly exporting colors.

[Banbury]

Well, that's my problem. LeoCAD seems to do things differently just for the heck of it. So I'm not using it.

[Banbury]

And I think we need a forum...

[rioforce]

I think this is a forum. :P I'll try another LDraw program to see how it works.

[MinnieTheMoocher]

@rioforce : the most advanced LDRAW program I suggest to try is LDView: http://ldview.sourceforge.net/

You can download it and use it to open *.ldr and *.dat files.

It has a POVRAY export option, which even includes primitives substitution if wanted.

I strongly recommend it to you to see the features that this LDR Importer easily could have,
for example primitives substitution (cylinders, spheres, tori, ...) (#44)
or gaps addition (#46) etc. pp.