'Awesome Awaits' aims to capture the magnetic and universal appeal of LEGOLAND. It sees a host of characters come to life in a young boy’s bedroom, before spilling onto the streets and triumphantly arriving at the gates of the theme park. The host of colourful characters, which includes dancing camels, pirates, pharaohs and parrots, are led by a LEGO dragon, which sweeps through the city, mimicking the iconic LEGOLAND rollercoaster ride.

Each character was carefully concepted, designed and crafted by the 3D team over several months before being animated and brought to life, utilizing millions of CG LEGO bricks. It was then the job of the 2D team to blend all of the CG LEGO renders and matte paintings into live action plates.

The characters were modeled as polygonal meshes. These were then rigged and animated, then passed from Maya to Houdini using a custom caching format.

Each animated character was then turned into bricks, by using our own plugin named 'Bricker'. Bricker was seamlessly integrated into the existing pipeline and automatically picked up animation.

The Pirate ship had 3 million individual LEGO bricks alone, not including the huge wave it was riding.

The bricked characters were then passed onto the Lighting team as a huge point cloud, each point representing the location and colour of a brick. This allowed the lighting scenes to be very lightweight as the LEGO bricks themselves are only created at render time using Arnold's powerful instancing system.