I worked on this set, literally, for years. (Not continuously! You know, when I had spare time). It’s not official, it’ll never come out, but it’s the perfect fusion of my childhood loves of James Bond and Lego. The frustration is that I designed the set for submission to the Lego Ideas program but didn’t submit it before they changed the rules of entry to prohibit concepts that use licenses they already hold. That’s understandable, as it would obviously be problematic if an Ideas submission replicated an idea Lego already had in development, but it’s no less painful that I don’t get to have the concept even considered. Lego have held the Bond license for five years now and made two sets in that time, I’m really hoping that the recent launch of the Speed Champions DB5 means there’s at least a chance we will get a minifigure scale Lotus Esprit at some point, but I’m not holding my breath.
I originally designed the set in the now defunct Lego Digital Designer but when it came to producing high quality renders, I imported the Digital Designer native files into LeoCAD and then saved the models out as OBJs. Digital Designer has some kind of magic smoothing group tech as it was clear, at the OBJ stage that I was going to have to recreate every single brick and element at a higher resolution, SO I DID! I resculpted the Lego elements in ZBrush before designing all the minifigure characters in Illustrator and rendering in Keyshot. Further down the page there’s a comparison between my rebuild of the helicopter cockpit and the Digital Designer cockpit to illustrate the level of faceting I had to overcome. Next time someone tells you ZBrush is no good for hard surface models, just show them this project.
The Spy Who Loved Me Lego Set
(Vehicles without decals to show modelling)
All models have working features
Lotus Esprit S1 with graphics
Lotus Esprit Cabin Interior
Bond in his Lotus
‘Wet Nellie’ underwater
The only submarine with a license plate
Stromberg’s Jet Ranger
Stromberg’s Pilot Naomi winks at Bond
Stromberg’s Jet Ranger in flight
Stromberg’s henchman on a motorcycle
Bond’s adversary
James Bond Agent 007 and Major Anya Amasova Agent XXX
Naomi, Stromberg’s Pilot
Stromberg’s Henchman
The Lego Digital Designer CAD was just too facetted to work with, I had to resculpt the whole thing
Who doesn’t love radial symmetry?
Minifigures, the perfect combination of organic and hard surface models
