The Scene

Building of the scene

Ok so I wanted this to be looking nice but fairly basic because the emphasis is on Bruce and his emotions, not so much the scene, so I've left the environment to the bare minimum needed really and created a kind of half built brick wall which Bruce the Builder is in the middle of building, this consisted of using the cloned Lego bricks and aligning them together to form this shape, much like in real Lego:






























As you can see, the Omni light reflects nicely off of the bricks.

I put a pile of bricks in front of Bruce for him to be building with:















Bruce is now all set to be animated, so on with 'Autokey' to get Bruce ready for being moved around:















I added these eyelids to the angry face but I'm not sure if its too late at this stage as was having trouble trying to get the main face to morph into this shape but will keep trying until the very end















The overall angry look I wanted to go for, whether this is completely possible or not, we'll see















After some work, I found out that I could only modify one thing at a time to morph, and as all the feature in the head are separate, it meant doing them all separately. Meaning cloning 5 or 6 heads just to edit the smile, so here we are below editing the mouth on the head cylinder:















As you can see all the mouths are different















I added the Morpher modifier to the head























and in doing that I can add each head as a Morph object for the original head to reference to when the frequencies are changed:















A couple of the morphs applied to experiment to see if they work.















Eyes

Here the eyes need a target to follow so they have something to look at, I used a helper-Point which is basically a nothing that you can click on, just a target and used a 'Lookat' constraint for the eyes to focus on.















Applying both of the eyes to look at the target so that when it is moved, the eyes move too:















Realsing that two targets would be a better to move each eye independently, I created another point helper and assigned the other eye onto that one:

The Hand

Creation of the Hand

Creating the hand was relatively easy, Lego men have hands like a clamp that don't move, obviously I do want to move Bruce's hands so I had to be able to figure out where to put bones in them but I still kept the basic shape of how the hand should be but a little squarer, I started off by creating a box and selecting the inner polygons as shown below to delete them:















I deleted these polygons and bridged the existing ones to cover the gaps:















I used the extrude tool for the end of each finger separately, looking back at this, I should have made the fingers longer:















Applied this method to all the fingers















added a cylinder to the end of the arm and put the hand in its place ready to be used by the symmetry and be placed on the other side















This was Lego man Bruce as he now stands















getting ready to inject anger into his character, I adjusted the eyebrows into a menacing looking state















and also had a happy face, it shows you the difference from just moving the eyebrows what an impact the face can have in looks:















Bones

Next came time for the bones, I started from the hips upwards towards the head, then I branched off towards the arms, then I link up the hips down towards the toes on one side:















Using the Bone Editing tools, I created a Bone Mirror to imitate the other side much like a Symmetry modifier















But the problem was I didn't create all of the foot bones, so had to go back and redo all of the feet bones and add the Bone Mirror again






























Now for a screenshot with the bones in place















Here is a little add in that I wanted to show because if I get enough time I will add this in, but I followed a tutorial to make a bulging bicep when the arm moves, I thought this would be a nice touch:






























Lego Board

To create the Lego board, I used a simple Green plane to start with and created a cylinder and made sure that the cylinder was no bigger than the inside of the foot:



















With the CYlinder, I now used the array tool to create lots of them and make sure they were spaced the exact same distance apart from each other, this task took up quite a bit of processing power on the older dual core computers at University which almost made them crash. The Quad core Macs managed it with ease however.


















Now with all the Cylinders selected, I added a material ID with the Lego logo to add a bit more realism















Onto realising at this point that when I did the Bone Mirror, I hadn't included in the finger bones, so back to that we go then:















Adding the Bone Mirror again:















I discover I needed to add an extra bone in the foot to be able to move it correctly so I added another one each side:















Mirrored it again and then selected the whole body and added a 'skin' modifier to it, the selection box below is me choosing the bones to fit within the skin modifier. This means that all of the bones selected will affect whatever is deemed to be 'skin', therefore in this case, it is the Legoman (Bruce):















Now came to set up a Y rotation link for all the fingers and thumb to enable them to move in the correct mannger, so this meant right clicking on the start of the link at the bottom of the wrist and selecting Transform-Rotation-Y Rotation















The same was done for the other side















Now the horrible terroritory that comes with bones is envelopes, and if they're done wrongly, it can provide very unsightly results and really takes some time to define which bone controls what parts of the body and to my dismay, I discover that having a bone and two other bodyparts close together is probably one of the more costly mistakes.














Thankfully here I had altered most of the envelopes that were attatching to the body, as you can see here there is a small patch of red on the body, this means that the bone in the arm would pull that part of the body when it was moved. As you can see in the next picture, it was worse than imagined, all the vertices (envelopes) are red on the body part underneath the arm:














This was bad because it meant either a lot of time consuming work to un-select them all to try and move the arm away because they were all so tightly together or to do my best to start this part again, So unfortunately, I chose to start again and detach the arm so that I could start again:















Used my best efforts to make the arm straight















Slowly attached the arm back on using the vertex weld function















Adjusted the bones and used the bone mirror again to mirror image the new shape with his arms out as they should've been in the first place:















Had to apply the skin modifier again as had to delete it when deleting the arm from the model and applied all the bones again:















Lego Brick

To make the Lego brick, a very Low poly box was made with the same size cylinders from the floor, added to the top, 6 of them in total:















I added the rest using the array feature to have them set out nice and correctly















and then added two cylinders to the inside just to add that final touch















I then deleted the polygons from the cylinders where the parts came through to the underside in an attempt to keep it looking realistic should a camera catch the underneath of one of the bricks.

I then used the clone tool to create a fair few more bricks:















A lot of time was then spent on trying to sort out the envelopes on the rest of the skin and bones:



























































































This was a very time consuming process and 100 screen shots could have easily been taken but the general idea is, there was a lot of fiddly bits to messed around with until it got right.