The LEGO movie: bricks, bricks and more bricks

Abstract

In The LEGO Movie everything on screen from characters and sets to oceans and explosions is realised with bricks. By building a brick library we were able to automatically assemble optimized models from XML files output by LEGO Digital Designer. A sophisticated shader and numerous texture variations for each brick were also created, allowing us to produce models with high quality default shading. For realistic lighting a Physically Based approach was used, as well as aggressive geometry instancing. To simulate imperfectly assembled models, a small procedural transform jitter was applied.