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Subject: 
Re: LEGO in CG classes was: easier parts authoring
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dev, lugnet.edu
Date: 
Tue, 15 Mar 2005 20:11:47 GMT
Viewed: 
1822 times
  
In lugnet.cad.dev, Darrell Urbien wrote:

   Hey, Stefan, that was neat! May I share it with my class? Any chance you could post some of the other things your class has created?

(Sorry for the late reply, I forgot to check up on the thread.)

You may share the movie freely, just keep the credits in there.

The other Lego-related student animations I would have liked to share were computer-animated Lego minifig remakes of two movie scenes: the initial scene of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and the scene from “Pulp Fiction” where Marvin accidentally gets shot in the head in the back seat of a car. Sadly, I never got my students’ permissions to keep or share those. (I did keep them anyway, secretly, but I won’t share them without permission.)

   One question: The credits list MLCAD and LDraw as applications used in the creation of the video - can you elaborate on this? Did they use LDraw measurements (or actual parts) in the final video? Or were those programs used only for reference?

They used the LDraw parts database for all pieces, converted through Polytrans which is not listed because they used it without a license. The assembly animation was done by disassembling an imported MLCad model and reversing the keyframing. The camera action and the minifig animations were done separately. The stylized rendering was done in a strange but clever fashion: they didn’t use a “toon”-style renderer, but instead rendered everything twice: one image with lighting and correct colors, and one image with a unique constant color for each part, on which they used the “find edges” filter from Photoshop to post-process and composite the resulting edges onto the image. This seemingly awkward rendering method is actually a whole lot faster than enabling the standard toon rendering edges in 3DS Max. I’ve used their idea myself later, with some modification.

   I’ve been incorporating LEGO into my 3D AutoCAD class since 2001.

Good to hear I’m not alone. I’m putting together a couple of Lego-themed exam questions for my computer graphics course right as we speak.

Stefan



Message is in Reply To:
  LEGO in CG classes was: easier parts authoring
 
(...) could post some of the other things your class has created? One question: The credits list MLCAD and LDraw as applications used in the creation of the video - can you elaborate on this? Did they use LDraw measurements (or actual parts) in the (...) (20 years ago, 9-Mar-05, to lugnet.cad.dev, lugnet.edu, FTX)

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