Finally I had to set the Rays to 16384 and it's still grainy 😃

The actual 8K rendering I will post soon took nearly 8 hours on a dual XEON machine.

@_@

8K - 7h 49m 15s on XEON E5-2620 v2

8K - 8h 29m 44s on XEON E5-2620 v2

Oh my gosh 😆 Wow love that 8 hour view. I mean, 8k view 😃 very symmetrical!

That's huge! Almost as many bricks as stars exist! 🌟 🌟 🌟 How many PS has it got? 🐎

You know that all this amazing render stuff started in 2014 with my LDRAW test before I found MECABRICKS and talked to Scrubs. Yesterday I had an exciting phone call with LEGO. The Star Wars Design Manager for Minifig-Design wants me to send my portfolio what he will forward to some decision makers. Let's see what the outcome will be. Working for LEGO as a premium supplier would be a dream come true.

Here's an update of my 2014 test with the nice LEGO® 10019 Rebel Blockade Runner. I sychronized my LDRAW material setup to my actual MECABRICKS setup.

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I'm very very very happy for you virtualrepublic, maybe working for Lego® is the dream of the great part of us!
So Michael, we cheer for you! 😄

Meanwhile, I want to show you this awesome Temple of Atlantis, created by Kris Lee on LDD and importend perfectly in MB, and finally rendered in Blender. 28.000 bricks. This is my computer's limit 😮

Great. How long did the render take with BLENDER?

Your and Wlange's Flikr portfolio are amazing. Be sure ... if I really would be working for LEGO - whatever that might be - I have some people on my list to hire for that 😃

3.000 x 3.000px, 8 hours virtualrepublic, but there is no Lego® logo on studs. 😉

And thank you so much for your kind words! We are ready to reach you at Billund! 😛

It's definitely not crazy high resolution (which would probably kill my laptop) but here's my latest rendering. Higher res: http://www.bricksafe.com/files/Umbra-Manis/renders/Exo-Suit%20-Tron%20Edition.png

Exo-Suit: Tron Edition

Hey hey hey UmbraManis! That's really well done 😄
I love your choise of transparent parts 😉

@Umbramanis what is your node setup in blender for your blue parts?

Its a really simple setup actually.

It is simple but I actually never thought about plugging the emission shader to the volume input! Thanks 😃

It has been a long time since I last posted an image in this thread. So here we are:

Space Debris Harvesting Ship by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

I am really happy when I see all of you guys making awesome stuff. I really think that we all brought LEGO rendering to another level. Before Mecabricks, options were quite limited and not friendly with mainly the old pov-ray for LDD or LDraw. Even with Bluerender nowadays, I don't think the results come any close to what we are doing here.

So a big congrats to all of you and keep posting awesome images!

Awesome!!! 😄

Testing with Fresnel settings. I am still searching for a correct Fresnel. 10% is too low and it looks like 70% is still a bit too much. And I set Absorption Distance for glass back to 0 to check this effect.

Oh. Wow 😮

So much work to do. Where to beginn? It's still a long journey for me since 2014 because I have to run my rendering digital LEGO research - what brought me finally to MECABRICKS end of 2014 - beside my animation business. Actually I started a simple turntable test to find out the right settings for different situations. MODO is quite fast but when you step away from causal stuff with HDR maps and use effects like Luminous shading you have to tweak the settings to get rid of grain. For a still it's not a big deal. But for animation it's not really an option to end up with 1 hour per frame. Finally you have to die one death. Quality in 3D has its price. We are starting to test with a GPU renderer soon. Afaik BLENDER cycles is supporting GPU rendering but might need an own shader setup for this. GPU rendering can make a big difference with a Nvidia Titan card. Frames rendering one hour on a multi-core GPU can be done in a few minutes. This is definitely worth a look at.

I haven't used BLENDER yet but will do this very soon for comparison tests with MODO.

Here's a fast unfinished test I did last night. Total rendertime on a Dual XEON computer for 120 frames (of 200) in 720p was 7:45 hours. The indirect lighting effects will need higher samples and this will increase the render time easily to 8+ hours. And it's not full HD. It's worth to take a look at several clound based render services for stuff like this.

https://vimeo.com/158457146