James MarlandTechnical Artist - Tools, Pipelines & Shaders

Breakdown 4 of 4

Emmet's apartment

I rebuilt Emmet's bedroom from The LEGO Movie brick by brick with my own tool, in 5 hours including lighting and camera.

Why this set

The last goal I set for the project was an environment built with the tool, and Emmet’s apartment had been a key reference from the start. The LEGO Movie (The LEGO Movie, 2014) was the first time LEGO really went for realism in animation, and the apartment near the start of the film looks almost real, because of its lighting and small scale.

Animal Logic built the film’s sets in LEGO Digital Designer (Fxguide, 2015), which is the export and import step Tool Brick is meant to remove.

The bedroom, rebuilt part by part in 5 hours.

Two builds

The first version was the whole apartment: the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen with its striped wall and checkered floor.

The first version of the apartment seen from the front, three rooms in a row on a yellow studded floor with green walls, a kitchen with a red and white striped wall and a checkered floor on the left, a middle room with plain coloured panels on the wall, and a bedroom with a red bed on the right
The whole apartment, first time round.
The first version's bedroom close up, a red bed and a white desk against green walls with plain pink and orange panels where the posters would be, and a purple glitter globe on the desk
Plain panels for posters.
The first version's living area, a lamp with a blue and white shade glowing yellow in front of the red and white striped kitchen wall, with a low brown table in the foreground

Then I started again with just the bedroom, this time following dr_lofstrand’s brick-by-brick recreation of the apartment on Mecabricks (dr_lofstrand, 2017). With the model and the film on a second screen, I rebuilt the bedroom part by part, with only a few changes to the parts and layout. It took 5 hours, including the lighting and the camera.

A Mecabricks render of a LEGO recreation of Emmet's apartment seen from above with the roof off: a kitchen with a striped wall and checkered floor on the left, a small bathroom in the middle and a bedroom with a navy bed on the right, all behind a brown brick front wall with arched windows
dr_lofstrand's model on Mecabricks, the reference for the rebuild.

It was built for one camera angle, so from anywhere else there isn’t much to see, but the level is still in the GitHub release as L_Apartment.

The final shot

The final render came out of Unreal at 4K, and I finished it in Photoshop.

The finished bedroom straight out of Unreal, the arched window glowing on the left, posters on the grey-green brick wall, the bed, a red wardrobe, a bike and a computer on a round table, lit warm orangeThe same frame after Photoshop, with fine film grain over the whole image and slightly softer, less saturated colourUnrealPhotoshop
Before and after retouching.
A low angle across the studded floor towards the bed, a green blanket catching the lamp light, the digital clock reading 12:01 on the bedside table behind it
Looking past a tall cream wall into the bedroom, the bed and red wardrobe at the back, a green plant in a pot in the foreground and warm light reflecting off the studs
Close up of the round desk, a chunky beige computer with a keyboard, a teal mug and a croissant, with the bike wheel behind
Looking up at the corner of the room, a red wardrobe with a round red shape on top, a patterned red and black poster lit gold on the wall, and a small white ornament on the bedside table

    From inside the bedroom out to the whole cutaway set, in the editor.

    This is where the realism features show the most, especially the random offsets and the worn master material, which are broken down on the toolset page.

    Credits

    The final build follows dr_lofstrand’s Emmet’s Apartment on Mecabricks. The surface textures in the master material are credited on the toolset page, and further credits are on the project’s GitHub.

    LEGO® is a registered trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, endorse or authorise this tool or this build. Visit the official LEGO website at lego.com.

    Sources