Ive seen some bigger youtubers have CG in their videos and they do it to a decent extent and i wish to do it like they do

Bump mapping for the texture is what the pros do. It's not that difficult to add bump maps to models, although I use Maya, not blender or LDraw for CGI, so I can't tell you how it's done in that program. It shouldn't be too difficult to find some tutorials. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_mapping

You should also allow for reflective properties on your models as well. Reflections probably more so than bump mapping tells the computer properties of particular objects in a 3D space, and how they interact with light. Getting your lights and shadows correct are difficult, but there's plenty of tutorials online as well for that. The thing to understand, is that just creating a 3D object, and putting a light on it isn't like putting a light on a real world object. The computer needs to know how the light interacts with the model to make it life like. The better you are at lighting, the better it will look.

Play around with some of the lighting and rendering settings in your 3D program to see how it works, but just remember, that as you work more so like the pros do it, it takes more rendering. The cheapest option for a one off project would be to send it off to a render farm that already has the services set up. If you plan to do a lot, then you should look into making your own render farm, although it does use a lot in electricity costs.

Anyway, you can only do so much with rendering an object, but don't play down the importance of lights. They're not prefabricated to be perfect.

The new KB Videos coming soon.

The importer script is just imports pre-built LDraw models into Blender. Like if you built a model in LeoCad or LDD, and saved it as .LDR, it will import that. (To install it into Blender, go to User Preferences>Addons>click Install from File at the bottom, and select the .ZIP that you downloaded from the site I linked.)

Some of my work includes Good Ol' Johnny, Friendless, and another render which will part of an upcoming Brickfilm. I rendered those with somewhere from 200 to 1000 samples, but those are image renders. For animations, I recommend about 200 and it's hard to tell how much time it will take to render (depending on your computer and scene), but maybe 5 minutes per frame?

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

I've never watched this, but here's a basics of Blender course. It's a video course, and it's free. Haha, when I started with Blender, they didn't have all these tutorials out yet, and I had to learn it manually and with very old tutorials.

http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses … beginners/

You can also check out http://www.blenderguru.com/ for other great tutorials.

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

I made the LEGO minifig textures myself after scanning them in from real minifigs ad tracing over them in a program called Inkscape. For the LEGO bump map, I scanned the rough edge of a 2x3 LEGO Slope brick and made it loop. For the seams and such, I just drew lines over my UV map in photoshop. If you'd like to download the textures I made for the minifigs, or the bump map, I have them online.

https://github.com/rioforce/LEGO-Textures

They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (which means that you just have to give credit to me if you use them ).

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

I use a simple photoscanner and I scan it at a high DPI (600 at max, but usually I just use 300). Then I trace them over in Inkscape, and that's it. If you're referring to the 3D models, I model them from scratch. I'm planning a tutorial some day on how to make minifigures in Blender, but I haven't finished recording it yet.

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

Maybe you should check out this tutorial after you watch the Basics of Blender tutorial I linked earlier in the topic.

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/02/29/ … n-blender/

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

It can also export other file types (fan made lego building program file types)