"More bricks"
Completion time: 4 days
Show me one contemporary person who dislikes lego! It's one of the greatest inventions and allows quick creative outlet for design-loving kids aged 3 to 99.
First off, I invest 37 seconds to develop a less-than-perfect concept of the minimen's awesome spaceport. With this I have an estimate of the types of bricks needed.
Then I model the bricks I will use for my composition using reference images from lego.com and looking at this really sweet lego digital design tool...
Miniman rigged and anxious to animate.
I decide to layer my final image in fog making my bottom plate barely visible so I settle on unshaded geometry, to be retouched in the final image.
My designs of the spaceship and tower will be seen in detail only from the front and I optimize my workflow leaving unoticable cavities.
For memory conservation of the many stacked high-poly bricks, I decide early on to sort out my image elements in layers. Even though I optimized the bricks for the far objects, my spaceport comes out to some 1,200,000 triangles, which when lit is far too much for my 32-bit system.
Since I render my plates in relatively low resolution (HD), I do experience some outlining and next time I'll be more careful to not render over black. I should have used the underlying layer as a backdrop to my plate to get the proper coloring of the contours.
And the final image...
Click the finished image for high-res version...