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.

Legs

Creation of the Legs

Ok to start with, I used a box and stretched it out to the length of Lego man's leg.















I slowly started to delete polygons and re-draw them where necessary to gain a closer shape to the actual Lego man's leg.















I added in many extra lines to gain the exact shape that I wanted and used a cylinder temporarily so that I could use the curved edge as a guide on curving the front of Burce's hip. I started to shape the foot as well















The next job was to extrude the top row of polygons on the inside of the leg so that there could be the middle section in between the legs:















Extruded:















After realising that I needed to extrude the whole hip inner and not just the top row, the same method was applied to this part:















I created a crease where you see the red lines as to define where the edge is and this is a small detail of what actual Lego man have so I added it for realism as well.















Scaling the crease smaller so that it would create a shadow inside it and become more apparent















Here is a quick render of what we have so far, Some sample colours were added for realism: I have added a Symmetry modifier on this now so that it finishes of the other half of the legs and the body nicely:


















Its not looking too bad, but as you can see my efforts at making the hips curved didn't pay off too well. However I am pleased with the stomach and chest. To make the hips look smoother, I attempted by adding more edges in vertically in the hope that it would reduce the above effect:















The above method was performed using the 'Connect' tool again, much like earlier.
Added some edges horizontally as well to increase the desired effect of being curved.















Used a cylinder in place again to get the exact location to place each vertex in order to create a curve















Head

Onto creating the face for the head now, the first task was to add a mouth, so I drew one using the cut tool being as accurate as I could to get it equal on both sides:















and then another line was cut just inside of this one so that we could extrude the inner polygons inside the head, this was achieved using the 'Chamfer' tool.















So using the extrude tool, I simply directed the inner polygons into the head















The eyeball was the next task and helpfully, Jo had taught us this in the lesson before this part was created, so I simply used the method I was taught in order to create the eyeball.
Create a sphere:















Clone it, give it a different colour and use the hemisphere slice tool until it looks like a pupil:















I used the scale modifier a stretched it outwards so that it protruded a little from the surface:















and then a space warp Binding box was added around the eye, this is to be able to manipulate the eye by pulling the box around:























The you have to pick the object you wish to bind to the space warp box, select the eyeball;















You should be able to now pull the eyeball about by moving the points in the Space Warp Box as per below















I then cloned this setup to produce two eyeballs that could follow a target if needed

Creation

Creation of the Body

To begin with, I used a Plane vertically with a reference image of a Lego man on, I used images from Google as I do not own any actual Lego men and did not know how soon I would be able to get hold on one and I wished to start work as soon as possible. I drew a Box the size of the body at the widest point and just used a random depth until I had my side view plane in place;















and as the body is a very simple shape, I simply used the vertex select option to just pull in the top corners to the same position as in the picture behind.So here we are to create Bruce, the Big, proud Lego man complete with ego. Bruce is to have big muscles and a big ego. here is the creation of his physical character:
















As you will be able from the screenshots, I used reference plates to get the size and proportions of a real Lego man, this was done by creating a place and adding a picture of a Lego man as a diffuse map. Becuase I do not own any Lego men, I used royalty free photos from Google Images. There were 2 perfect pictures that came up of the front view and the side view near enough perfectly lined up, these were good enough to use, so I placed them on the planes ready to start the creation of Bruce. As per above, I used a short cylinder to start creating the arm, I then rotated the cylinder downwards and scaled it to what length I thought it should be, as all Lego men arms are bent by default, it wasn't a straight forward task to just copy the length:















I then used the slice tool to mark where I wanted to cut it with a nice angle to represent the bend in the arm













I then applied the slice modifier to achieve this result:













and then cloned that part to form the rest of the arm:













It was simply a case then of placing the arm in the exact position to seamlessly attach it to the other part of them arm, this was not an easy challenge trying to get it to look natural (using both views to position it):







































Once the arm was in position it was simply a matter of attaching the vertices













Here the arm is looking a little unnatural, so some adjustments are needed













Deleted some extra unnecessary edges that were placed there making the arm look odd so that I could add some extra ones in


























Adjusting individual vertices:













Next I wanted to add in some extra edges so that I could define the elbow and the inner crease of the elbow some more, this was achived by selecting the edges around the arm and using the 'Connect' button:













After doing the same again:













Adding more edges in:













Using the scale tool with the new edges selected gives the outer and inner elbow a rounder shape to it:













As we can see the arm is starting to come into shaper with Bruce's muscles starting to bulge, I wanted to get a fairly accurate representation of a bulging arm so I used another plane with a reference photo to imitate the shape:














The picture came on the wrong way round so I simply rotated it until it was the correct angle to work with the arm:


























Here is there arm attached to the body and some turbosmooth added as well





























Here I chose to give Bruce some rippling muscles for his chest and Stomach as he is a builder and very physically fit, I highlighted the polygons in the center of his stomach to represent a toned stomach:















Here was the result with the same method applied to the chest (however its not that clear here because its only a see through mesh):

Character Bio

Hi Im Bruce, or at least i will be when I'm created, I am 29 years old with a heavy temper, I don't like people giving me negative comments on things I do or the way I am. When I want something done, I do it. Simple. Im single I live alone and don't need anyone else in my life right now, things are rosey thanks and My job as a Brick layer keeps me busy, in fact I have quite an obsession for bricks and building in general. I'm a bit of a musclego man as you will probably see from my pictures soon to come and don't have much in the way of friends, in fact I see most people I know more as acquaintances.


Well that's what Bruce had to say about himself when I asked him, from his character I perceive that he is bitter and twisted about something but he said that it is something he doesn't want to go into, its actually a matter of not having forgiven a few people in his life and harboring the negative emotions about them consequently giving him the type of character he is today, shame really.