Perifractic writes:
I'm proud to introduce you to the full-size working LEGO Commodore 64 project, designed partly in Blender.
When I saw a mini Commodore 64 made of Lego, I thought "What about a full-size one". This started me down a wormhole or discovery and creation. You see the real Commodore 64 cases are getting harder to find in good condition. Plus people have started putting Raspberry Pis in them to create a "new" C64 using emulation, so the market is strong.
I started out with the app Studio which is a Lego construction kit in software form. From there you can design and crucially *order* your Lego design.
But I really wanted to animate the assembly of the Lego, as you can see in the finished video. For this I found a plugin for Blender called AssembleMe (see video description for all the links.) The developer was really good at helping me fix some issues and he released several updates until it was working perfectly with my Studio file.
But even getting the Studio file into Blender wasn't easy. I had to get another plugin to take LDraw files out of Studio into Blender. But it worked, after days of tinkering!
Finally I was able to use Blender to rotate the camera as the bricks dropped into place. I did this by placing a central rotation point, and making it parent to the camera. Then I rotated the central point (not the camera) to get the cool panning effect you see.
Everything was ready to go... but then disaster! I realized the 4 animations I wanted would take me 5 days to render! To the rescue came BlenderGrid.com who rendered everything in 2 hours. I was saved, and the video was ready to publish!
The reaction has been incredible, with over 50,000 views for my small channel.
You can even vote for Lego to make the kit a reality at Lego Ideas. See video description to vote!
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the project.
Your friend in retro,
Perifractic
Watch the full video of the project including Blender animations:
