This Digital Asset can turn any geometry or volume into a copy made of Lego bricks. it supports static and animated/deforming inputs and, thanks to the way it decides how to place the pieces, there are no intersections between them.
In the General tab you can choose the type of input (geometry or volume), the number of divisions and the seed of the bricks placement. There is also an option to only evaluate exterior pieces which is on by default.
At first the input gets ''filled'' with only 1x1 pieces which is done simply by copying them onto a 3D point grid.
By checking the Use 1x2 Pieces option, one half of the main algorithm starts to work:
It checks if a point has at least one neighbor which is not already occupied by another 1x2 piece. If one is found, it copies the piece onto the first point oriented towards the second one and marks both as "occupied".
If the Use 2x2 Pieces is checked, then the other half of the algorithm gets ran:
It works almost the same as the previous one but it makes some additional checks: since the 2x2 piece occupies 4 points, it needs to make sure that there are 2 more free points on the left or on the right of the first 2. This is easily done using cross product between the forward vector and the up vector.
At this point, the points that remain are all "single" and get a 1x1 piece.
The Volumes tab is used only if the input is a volume. It has options to choose which field is used to build the bricks as well as mapping other fields used by the shader (density, heat, temperature).
In the Transition tab are the controls to animate simple transitions. These can remove/offset the bricks making them appear/disappear or move in or out of place in different directions or from the center.
The shader tab contains all the controls of the built-in shader. The color has many options to choose from (constant, point color, texture, ramp, random, volume, piece type) and can be driven using volume fields to also control emission.