Lego Rubik

What would you make if you could make anything you want from Lego?

Here is my 3D rendering of a Lego Rubik\'s Cube. Of course, it is not made entirely from real Lego pieces, but it\'s the idea that I found important here. It\'s more about whimsy than realism.

Each object in this scene was modeled by me from scratch and rendered using Lightwave 3D 9.6. I used the tricks of learned while teaching myself Lightwave to be able to render the complex geometries in this scene without crashing my somewhat older system or running out of memory. One such tactic was to compromise the render quality just enough to allow the scene to render. Another was to cheat on the geometry in subtle ways to (hopefully) fool the eye while greatly reducing the number of polygons required to render. For example, there was a huge reduction in polygons by modeling the the Lego "bumps" as separate surfaces from the bricks that the "bumps" are attached to. Tricks like that greatly simplify the geometry. A complex injection molded shape can become a simple cube with simple cylinders positioned strategically to look like a more complex shape.