The LEGO movie: construction, animation and demolition

Abstract

The creative requirements for The LEGO Movie demanded that the entire world be made of individual LEGO bricks, with no cheating. Whole buildings needed to be demolished into their component bricks, vehicles pulled apart and re-assembled differently and some parts of the set were to be ripped up and formed into other objects. Even simulated FX like oceans, dust and clouds were to be made of bricks. To achieve this challenging brief and support rendering of massive amounts of geometry, we added a brick-based layer under our existing asset pipeline, which we kept 'live' all the way through to final rendering. This approach allowed us to leverage brick specific render optimisations, and to automate various tasks such as model building and surfacing.