These Lego explosion renders are a result of the fully procedural system I created to simulate and render community made Lego models from the site Mecabricks.com. I started by writing a script in Maya to convert the material shaders exported from Mecabricks into vertex color attributes which would be easier to apply later in the process.

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I then took the converted models into Houdini where I added subtle randomization to each brick, set up constraints to hold the bricks together, dialed in the physics properties to mimic real life, and used an RBD rigid body simulation to destroy the models. The last step of the process was to create a physically accurate Lego shader in Arnold, light, and render!