Chris Salt created this excellent Lego fan movie in Blender.



LEGO Ideas is a scheme LEGO run where fans upload their own designs and other fans get to vote on which ones they'd like to see produced as official sets. A friend of mine created an exo suit model that got enough votes to be picked up for production.

The 3 minute promo video just released by LEGO Ideas was created in Blender 2. It's part of a fan-led marketing campaign so it doesn't signify a move on their part towards open source or anything. It has official Lego backing though. Pretty cool, right?

I've been making LEGO stop motion animations for several years and he knew I'd recently been learning to use Blender. So when the Ideas team asked him for some thoughts on how to promote the set, he suggested that they should get me to make a little teaser video. Being relatively new to Blender and CG animation, I had no idea what was involved, so I said yes.

LEGO sent me a high poly FBX model of the exo suit and figures which I imported into Blender. I then had to fix a lot of the geometry, rig it for animation, create materials, etc, etc. in order to get something I could work with.

The background walls and doors were build in a third party LEGO CAD application called MLCAD, then imported into Blender and fixed up again.

The whole film was made over three months of evenings and weekends (I have a full time job doing something much less fun). It was originally supposed to be about a minute long but somehow kept growing and growing as I thought of more cool stuff to add to it. The last two weeks of that time were spent rendering the final shots, spotting mistakes, re-rendering, swearing and crying.