Lego Rendering Pipeline Tools
personal project - pipeline for creating renderings based on models from website mecabricks.com
This is a personal side project I have been working on in my spare time. It consists of a number of pipeline tools that make it possible to quickly light and render Lego models downloaded from the website mecabricks.com.
After a download, the models (.dae files) are adjusted and converted by a batch script using Maya in terminal mode. The result is an alembic file and a .xml file containing material properties and a material assignment mapping. The model can now be loaded into Katana using a custom macro that imports the alembic and automatically sets up the needed material networks by accessing the information in the .xml file.
It is a lot of fun to be able to digitally built Lego on Mecabricks or use prebuilt models from their library and light them in a great lighting tool like Katana.
In the video above you can get a quick glimpse of how this process looks like and below are example scenes that I built when testing the pipeline tools:
