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Lego Plastic Shader in MtoA

6 REPLIES 6
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Message 1 of 7
kyanetemadi
5136 Views, 6 Replies

Lego Plastic Shader in MtoA

Hey Fellas!

This is my first post to this forum and I hope someone can give me the right hint for the last few steps for an photorealistic look.

I am working on a small side project and started to build Lego bricks in scale (1 block is approximately 3x1.5 Maya units). Now that the modeling is done, I'm getting to the real deal: creating a convincing and photorealistic Lego shader with Arnold 5 in Maya.

What I did so far is a simple shading setup with a coat on top but i am not 100% happy with it. I saw @Lee Griggs Lego renders on his Website (https://leegriggs.com/lego-renders) and really want to recreate these convincing looking shaders for my project.

- I dont have any diffuse in my Lego Shader, just full randomwalk SSS (weight of 1), a red SubSurface color and the Radius has a slightly brighter red. The scale is set to 0.020, the Type is Randomwalk and I am not using the Anisotropy.

- For the specular, I set the IOR to 1.550 for plastic, have a roughness of about 0,500 (driven by a combination aiNoises) and the overall weight of the specular is 0.500

- On top of that I have the coat with a weight of 1, white reflection color, a roughness of 0.180, an IOR of 1.550 and an aiNoise screened with an (crappy) alpha of the LEGO- Font in an aiComposite node that goes into the coat normal. I also want to introduce an aiCurvature to break up the coatSpec on the edges of the Lego brick to create imperfections in the next step.

Maybe someone can give me some tips on how to improve the shader or share a setup. Don't know if I'm doing something terribly wrong.

2395-setup-so-far.jpg

Here is a test render of what I have so far. The light is just a standard HDRI (the famous Kitchen Probe from Paul Debevec). It's on a good way but I feel that there is something off.. maybe the overall spec roughness in conjunction with the coat is not adjusted the proper way?

2394-legoshader.jpg

Regards,

Kyan

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6 REPLIES 6
Message 2 of 7
zenop
in reply to: kyanetemadi

The trick for these type of things is to get yourself an old brick and look at what the reflection is doing when you hold it up to a light. You’ll see that there are many subtle warping displacements from the molding process. It’s super important to paint these in to get a convincing realistic look.

Then ofcourse implement the scratches/edge breakup/fingerprints, and make sure to closely match the Lego colours. They stick to an extremely limited set of colours.

Message 3 of 7
kyanetemadi
in reply to: kyanetemadi

Hey @Zeno Pelgrims, thanks for your reply! I am having an aiNoise going into the normal input of the specular coat to mimic the warping of the molding process. Do you think its not strong enough? Maybe making the aiNoise a bit broader and increasing the bump strenght?

For the edge breakup I am trying to get the coat roughness via an aiCurvature node that I am masking with a couple of aiNoises and clamping the ranges inside aiRange to break up the lines. I don't feel full control yet and I need to refine it more, but its hard to adjust everything inside Maya compared to painting a map.. but thats the challenge! Also using this map to mask in some scratches and desaturate colors is what I want to go for. Check the roughness that i have so far in the image below. It definitely needs to become way better and I really want to achieve a good map in the end.

2402-lego-roughness.jpg

I also started to introduce an aiCellNoise with a dense worley1 pattern that I am also masking with other aiNoises to get very rough dots that mimic dirt stains. They should change randomly in size for more realism.

Here is what I have right now. Its evolving, but there is still some work to do.

2403-legoshader4.jpg

For the Lego colors I am eyeballing reference images to adjust the SubScatter- and Radius color for the SSS to match. I also dug in the crates and got me some old Lego to play with on my desk.

2401-reference.jpeg

Whats the best way of bringing in fingerprints? I have tiled maps that I could use but I am not sure on how to spread them convincingly over the whole brick inside Maya (and not having them too dense all over the model). Is masking away of a fingerprint-map with bits of aiNoises and aiCurvatures a good approach?

Do you think it would help to bring in a bump or even a displacement in conjunction with the roughness on the edges to really break it up the edges like in the reference image above?

Lego is not as easy as I thought it would be. It's challenging right now, but its a lot of fun to go down the rabbit hole.

Message 4 of 7
lee_griggs
in reply to: kyanetemadi

Here is a recent example (by no means perfect!).

2416-lego.jpg

Lee Griggs
Arnold rendering specialist
AUTODESK
Message 5 of 7
lee_griggs
in reply to: kyanetemadi

BrickIt contains an excellent Arnold Lego shader.

Lee Griggs
Arnold rendering specialist
AUTODESK
Message 6 of 7
kyanetemadi
in reply to: lee_griggs

Hey Lee,

thank you for remembering and coming back to this post! I‘m still working on my private LEGO project whenever I find some spare time. I already built my own, custom LEGO set before Round Corners got released and created a shader that I am happy with before Romain introduced his plugin for Maya on Artstation.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don‘t want „out of the box“ solutions for my portfolio-work I‘m doing at home and half the fun with these side projects is tackling everything by myself.

But I thought about getting BrickIt once I‘m done with my project to play around with.

2895-legogogogogo.jpg

Message 7 of 7
lee_griggs
in reply to: kyanetemadi

Nice to see it progressing Kyan!

Lee Griggs
Arnold rendering specialist
AUTODESK

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