Moonless Street
When I first started dabbling in RenderMan a few years ago, I began by converting LEGO Digital Designer files, with the idea that I could tackle LDraw later. Now that LDD is discontinued, someone else has written l2rib that can do the job of converting LDraw to RenderMan, but I thought it would be fun to add the capability to my program since I'm already so far into this.
This modular street scene shows what I've accomplished so far: the LDraw geometry extracts correctly and I've got most of the material types rendering properly, including subsurface scattering for the opaque colours. There's even a glow-in-the-dark ghost in this scene. (I still need to do glitter and speckle materials, and do a pass for colour correctness.) I support scene files that let you automatically attach lights to, say, "all round 1x1 bricks in transparent yellow", which made lighting the night time scene easy.
I've yet to smooth out the curved surfaces in a way that I like. I tried subdivision surfaces and they look lovely for some bricks but not others. This render enables subdivision surfaces for the bricks that work properly, which are most of them. When I have time, I think I'll add smoothed normals for the bricks that don't work with subdivision.
I downloaded some lovely HDRI images from HDRIHaven.com to light the scenes and provide backdrops. They're an excellent and free resource and I highly recommend their Patreon.
Each of these images took 2-4h to render on my 16 core machine. I haven't made serious attempts to optimize yet because I'm mostly enjoying playing with the look. This is how I relax after work. :)
Moonless Street
When I first started dabbling in RenderMan a few years ago, I began by converting LEGO Digital Designer files, with the idea that I could tackle LDraw later. Now that LDD is discontinued, someone else has written l2rib that can do the job of converting LDraw to RenderMan, but I thought it would be fun to add the capability to my program since I'm already so far into this.
This modular street scene shows what I've accomplished so far: the LDraw geometry extracts correctly and I've got most of the material types rendering properly, including subsurface scattering for the opaque colours. There's even a glow-in-the-dark ghost in this scene. (I still need to do glitter and speckle materials, and do a pass for colour correctness.) I support scene files that let you automatically attach lights to, say, "all round 1x1 bricks in transparent yellow", which made lighting the night time scene easy.
I've yet to smooth out the curved surfaces in a way that I like. I tried subdivision surfaces and they look lovely for some bricks but not others. This render enables subdivision surfaces for the bricks that work properly, which are most of them. When I have time, I think I'll add smoothed normals for the bricks that don't work with subdivision.
I downloaded some lovely HDRI images from HDRIHaven.com to light the scenes and provide backdrops. They're an excellent and free resource and I highly recommend their Patreon.
Each of these images took 2-4h to render on my 16 core machine. I haven't made serious attempts to optimize yet because I'm mostly enjoying playing with the look. This is how I relax after work. :)