Buildings and scenes from Hungary

It is well known that I like LEGO Architecture sets. Not so long ago I posted a review of the 21011 Brandenburg Gate on kockagyar.blog.hu (in Hungarian) that triggered some of the fans to build several famous buildings and scenes from around the country. Many of them sent me the model they created so that I can render them in nice quality. Let me show you the result, click on the images to see them in large:

The Hungarian Parliament, Budapest (Sárkányapu)	The Parliament from another angle (Sárkányapu)
Heroes square, Budapest (Könyvtároslány / Haynau)	"Truncated" church, Debrecen (Yooha)
The Great Church, Debrecen (Yooha)	The University of Debrecen (Yooha)
The Dome of Eger (Yooha)	The Dome in microscale (Yooha)
A kilenclyukú híd, Hortobágy (Mnarko)	The puszta (Mnarko)

Super Car history from Eric Albrecht

We have covered the history of Technic cars a long time ago (see part I, part II and part III).

Now Eric Albrecht (also known as Blakbird, author of Technicopedia) did the same on the in the guest post of the official LEGO Technic blog:

The history of LEGO "Super Cars" is even longer than the Technic line itself, beginning in 1977 and running right up to the present day. There is no official definition of Super Car and therefore different fans might include different models on their own list. Most fans consider a Super Car to be one of the large scale automotive models which attempt to maximize realistic function as much as possible. Over the years, the models got more and more functionally realistic, and the complexity peaked in about 1994. Since then, subsequent supercars have become more realistically styled without adding a lot of complexity.

Read more...

LDD Pov-Ray Rendering tutorial

Several people asked me to provide more details on rendering LEGO models like the Trabi or the MiG-15. Until the surprise is built, let me entertain you with a tutorial on how to render LEGO models.

Before we start, let me underline that this is by no means a straightforward process. You should start only if you are ready to edit programming-language-like text files and download, unzip and manually organize files. It needs several hours, some debugging and tweaking, and possibly more hours to compute the final image.

Ok, if you have read so far, then you are at least curious to know what it takes. What follows is based on Koyan's excellent tutorial with some tweaks. Let's see how a typical render is made!

Step 1: I install LDraw. LDraw is an community-maintained database of LEGO bricks that will be needed for our photorealistic renders. As you can guess, this is needed once only. I download and unzip several files:

• LDraw official parts (Core Files and Libraries / LDraw Parts Library, zip format). I unzip them in a directory on my computer. This is my LDraw directory.
• Many bricks are not in the official release. I download the LDraw unofficial parts as well. Unzip those files as well and move them in the LDraw directory too. Some files will already exist, I don't overwrite them.
• LGEO is another parts library that is made especially for POV-Ray renders. It contains fewer parts but those are nicely modeled. I download and unzip it into a separate directory.

| The original dome in  Lego Digital Designer |