Lego Star Wars

If you love Lego or Star Wars, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of Lego Star Wars for the XBox or other gaming platform. It can be found for $19 these days, and it is probably one of the best and well made games I've ever seen. It has good puzzles, awesome lego construction, follows the first three episodes quite well, great mixed game play and story line. Humorous Lego minifig animation, expression and acting, and great control (wish you could control the camera a bit, however).

Lego's and Mech's...mmmm

So, as if Lego's and computers wasn't about as nerdy as you could get, why not lump in sci-fi mechwarrior in with it. Cool!

http://www.legomechwarrior.net/

and

http://www.brickcommander.com/

Rendering Lego's

I'm working hard to try to get the lighting right when rendering LDraw files in Pov-Ray. It is especially tough to get it looking right with realistic backgrounds. The Lego parts just look fake-ish and too cartoonish in more realistic background settings. I tried increasing the ambient lighting, dropping the direct lighting a little, changing the color just a bit (to match the purple nebula coloring) and backed the camera off just a bit on my X-Wing in nebula render. I also increased the difuse settings (need to do some test renders to see if it is actually doing anything). The next thing I think I need to look at, is the color choice settings in the ldraw_colors.inc and possibly pick some different, more earth-tone colors for better "real-life" renders. Shrug. It may be that a Lego DOES look out of place in real world settings. Especially the older more vibrant colors that Lego use to use. Actually, I've never really liked the colors used on the Lego Model 7191 UCS X-Wing (you can see comparisons of Luke Skywalker's Red Squadron fighter below). The green tiles and some of the tan plates seem out of place. I assume they were trying to make it looked patched together, ozonated, and dirty from lots of battles and not enough maintainance, but the Lego version needed duller plates and bricks, not tan and green colors. I may have to really think about making the white more of a smoke/white, eliminate the tan and green colors and see if that renders better in space...