LEGO Racers Diorama

[Jimbob]

Full 4K PNG downloadable here. David Roysk is my artist name, kudos to anyone who can guess how I came up with it.

 

This is my entry for the LR competition! Credits for the decals are in the link above. The aim was to make something that looked like a photo a kid might have taken with his toys, of course using photo-manipulation wizardry to get Rob-N-Hood floating haha. I'm not skilled enough to achieve photorealism yet but I think I did an okay job. I used procedural textures for some of the stuff which was a fun technique to experiment with. The ground was partly sculpted and I think I could have done much better with it, but I'd already spent many hours over a couple of weeks and at some point you have to call it a day!

 

Rob-N-Hood was chosen as he was one of my favourite characters in the game, and that was totally not because green is my favourite colour or anything.

Captain Redbeard in the Small Transport Truck is a reference to a mod I made which took a ridiculous amount of time to make.

Rocket Racer is there because of course he has to be, the ultimate boss and an epic dude too!

Racey Hazey is the racer my mum would use when I was a little, and has a (true) story to go with her:

 

Quote

My brother and I received LEGO Racers when we were quite young. We absolutely loved it and every day of the following week proceeded in much the same fashion. During our allotted computer time, each of us would fervently accept the challenge of the circuit races, trying and failing over and over again to defeat the boss. At night after we had gone to sleep, our mother would sneak onto the computer underneath our high-rise bed and quietly play out her similar competitive obsession. Somehow she thought we wouldn't wake up from the low-volume screeches and explosions, the whacky music and the frequent AH, OOH, NO, and COME ON! exclamations. We would slip over to the side of the bed and try to watch her racing from above, but it was difficult to make out the tiny monitor hiding behind her silhouette.

 

Each session would conclude with a triumphant but subdued cry of "YES!" accompanied by a rocking of the chair and victorious tunes whispering from the speakers, and the new champion would creep her way back out of our room, curiously without a second look at her children - as if she didn't want to accept the fact that maybe she had indeed woken us up. The next day my brother and I would log onto the computer to find a new face greeting us on the menu screen, with the circuit we'd be struggling so hard to beat now cleared. We'd cry out "MUUUM!" to a guiltily cheeky "Whaaat?", but the excitement of having new tracks and a new boss would quickly subside the frustration.

 

So the cycle would repeat every day, until finally we had our mother's confession when we reached the almighty Rocket Racer. Her claim was that she didn't want to take away our chance of being the first to beat the ultimate champion, but we knew the truth that even the great Racey Hazey just wasn't good enough to cross the finish line first. It took many, many tries and an abundance of wasted daily computer time, but eventually we did conquer the seventh and last chapter of our epic quest. Nobody knows know whether Racey Hazey ever did emerge on top too, for the fabled racer quietly slipped away shortly thereafter to become a figment of legend...

 

Thanks for taking the time to check out my entry! I had an awesome time making it.

[Cyrem]

Love the detail in your diorama, especially the dirt on the wheels. Nice touch!

 

Thanks for sharing your story too, I find it hilarious that your mum snuck in after you guys went to bed. I used to sneak and play it during the night too!

[Jimbob]

Thank you! It took a bit of work but I'm glad the tyre dirt is appreciated haha.

[Jugebox98]

I hope this picture will win this competition

I was showing this to my friends and they said this to be very well done. They asked me how this was made and I couldn't tell. Can you tell us how you made this?

[Jimbob]

Cheers!

First the models were built in LEGO Digital Designer, then I used @M2m's converter to bring them into Blender where I posed them.

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I set up custom materials for the models using the Principled BSDF shader, including a tiny bit of subsurface scattering which breathes a little life into the bricks.

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Then the meshes were edited a bit, mainly to add bevels to the edges for realism.

The ground is a tiled texture from Poliigon which I sculpted large lumps into. For the finer details I used a displacement map, which modifies the mesh on a much more precise level.

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For the foliage I placed a bunch of objects in LDD, converted them and set up the materials. Then it was a simple case of duplicating them around the scene with slight rotations.

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I always use an HDRi for lighting and usually some additional lights too, but for this scene the environment lighting was enough. The camera is set up roughly following basic composition techniques like the rule of thirds. A focal point is set with an aperture for depth-of-field as well as a focal length to get a dynamic shot. I considered adding motion blur but decided that to fit the theme of a child taking a photo, it wouldn't make sense, which was great anyway as it's less work for me

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After countless test renders and constant tweaking to until I was mostly happy (there comes a point where you have to kick out the perfectionist inside!), I sent it to a render farm which spits out a number of different passes that I can use in post-processing.

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After that a ton of further work is done in Photoshop. Corrections such as fixing "fireflies" (bright white pixels in the render) come first, then I paint in smoke/dust and add mist. Next I use the Nik Collection plugin to do a bunch of colour work which really transforms the image - while it's best to get colours, lighting, etc in the initial render looking as close to the final piece as possible, there's always more that can be done in Photoshop and it's sometimes easier. Finally I'll add a vignette and camera imperfections: film grain, lens distortion and chromatic aberration. Funny enough they're things that real photographers work hard to remove from photos, while CG artists do the opposite to try and get their art looking more realistic haha.

 

Hopefully that was somewhat helpful? Blender can be a bit daunting, but the latest 2.8 update included a huge change to the interface and it's more accessible to new users now.

[M2m]

That’s exactly the kind of work I feel happy that the converter helps to support!

 

Great render !

[Jugebox98]

I would have been satisfied with simpler answer but I appreciate all the details you showed Actually on of my friend have started making 3D art and showing him this would help him. But simply... wow :DD This is some professional level made stuff.