Lego Body

In this weeks Tutorial we began looking at the body of lego character. Using boxes at first and then extruding them to make the lego body itself. 

I then looked at making the Lego hand using primitive objects (tube). I found this to be quite complicated, but by converting to a polygon and using the vertices and the edges of the object I managed to get the basic shape of the Lego hand.

Lego: Mood Board

Age Group: 5 to 11
Gender: Male
Likes: Sport, Cartoons, Comics, Toys

Lego: Research

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#Design 

Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a strong, resilient plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS).  As of September 2008, the engineers use the NX CAD/CAM/CAE PLM software suite to model the elements. The software allows the parts to be optimized by way of mold flow andstress analysis. Prototype molds are sometimes built before the design is committed to mass production. The ABS plastic is heated to 232 °C (450 °F) until at a dough-like consistency. It is then injected into the molds at pressures between 25 and 150 tons, and takes approximately 15 seconds to cool. The molds are permitted a tolerance of up to two micrometres, to ensure the bricks remain connected. Human inspectors check the output of the molds, to eliminate significant variations in color or thickness. According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required. Lego factories recycle all but about 1 percent of their plastic waste from the manufacturing process every year. If the plastic cannot be re-used in Lego bricks, it is processed and sold on to industries that can make use of it.

Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Molding is done in Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; and Monterrey, Mexico. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and Kladno in the Czech Republic. The Lego Group estimates that in the course of five decades it has produced some 400 billion Lego blocks.Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion per year, or about 1140 elements per second. If all the Lego bricks ever produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks.According to an article in BusinessWeek in 2006, Lego could be considered the world's No. 1 tire manufacturer; the factory produces about 306 million tiny rubber tires a year.

(A picture of early lego blocks along with their dimensions)

(Dimensions of basic lego character, from http://snively.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/lego-minifig-dimensions.html)

Into to Polygon Modelling

As an introduction to Polygon modelling we made a standard plastic bottle but used a cylinder instead of lines and lathe. After creating the basic shape I experimented with the bottles shape using scale and extruding sections of the bottle. After that I then added the modifier turbo-smooth to made the bottle look for natural.  


These renders are of my final bottle design, created using 3D max.

Practice Bottle

For this week tutorial class we made a basic bottle, this is to help us in the creation of our own bottle. Using lines we created the outline of one half of the bottle and then using lathe to create a full bottle.