Tag Archives: CAD

You don’t have to own a single LEGO brick to have fun building with LEGO. Software like LDraw and LEGO Digital Designer empowers people to create virtual LEGO models unconstrained by the scarcity of a particular LEGO brick (or even its availability in a specific color).

Palm Springs and zeros and ones

Matt Wagner's Palm Springs scene

Matt Wagner (jedimasterwagner) is fast becoming one of my favourite LDrawers. As can be seen in this latest work he treats the rendering process as a means of creating artworks as well as for constructing models. I’d love to see the image he based this on for comparison.

Sjaak Alvarez makes life difficult for the Empire

Sjaak Alvarez recently posted a third installment in his ongoing series “It’s hard to be a Stormtrooper”.

Watch for the hilarious cameo at the end:

Sjaak animates each of his videos himself, using 3ds max 2009 and final Render 2.0. Very cool.

Screaming along with Matt Wagner aboard the Sleepy-time Express

Our resident virtual LEGO and cave racer expert is dutifully withholding judgement as the Pigs on the Wing contest winds down.

But this virtual cave racer by Matt Wagner is too cool to pass up:

LDraw – the original LEGO CAD

LDraw SOTM winner One of my side-interests (originally my main interest) in LEGO is CAD or virtual building using the LDraw system first created by the late James Jessiman. When you have a small collection of parts it is a great way to ‘build’ models that live up to your imagination rather than being limited to your supply. LDD provides one means of creating virtual LEGO models but if you take the time to learn it the older LDraw provides a much wider pallette of parts and more powerful tools than LDD. Best of all the two programs can share files with a bit of tweaking.

I realised today that many TBB readers may not be familiar with LDraw so I thought I’d take a brief moment to promote it. Most discussions takes place on LUGNET but to make things more accessible I created a Facebook group and Flickr group too. Hopefully I’ll see some fresh faces at one of these places. The LDraw website (and organisation) organise regular challenges and contests too so be sure to check them out.

NB. The image above is by Jan Folkersma and is the winner of the LDraw Scene of the Month contest from January 2007

The Brothers Brick interviews Chris Giddens and Mark Sandlin [Interview]

There’s been more than a bit of speculation about the upcoming fan-designed Space sets (a couple more pictures), so I asked Chris Giddens and Mark Sandlin a few questions.

Andrew Becraft: Let’s get the easy questions out of the way. Are the two of you the fans behind the designs for the forthcoming Star Justice and Space Skulls sets?

Chris Giddens: Yes. I did the Star Justice set, and Mark did the Space Skulls.

Mark Sandlin: It’s been confirmed on articles in Brickjournal and Gizmodo.

Andrew: How much does each set cost and how many pieces are in each?

Chris: Cost has been announced at $99.00 for the sets. The Justice set is 895 pieces. The Skulls set has 956. I don’t know know if LEGO will make a combo pack that’s less than $198, but it’s a possiblity.

Andrew: Fans have noticed the clear similarities between “Star Justice” and Chris’ Pre-Classic Space (PCS) sub-theme, and between “Space Skulls” and Mark’s 3vil sub-theme. Now that we know you designed these sets, can you explain why they just aren’t called PCS and 3vil?

Mark: “3vil” doesn’t really translate well, unfortunately.

Chris: PCS meaning Pre Classic Space doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning to the general public. That and 3vil are kinda AFOL stuff that we get, but doesn’t easily communicate what it is on the box.

Andrew: Can each of you describe some of the highlights of the sets you designed? What’s your favorite feature?

Mark: I don’t really have one single favorite feature, but we both tried to put playability into the sets. We wanted to make sets that were fun to play with, not just a pretty model that sits on the shelf.

Chris: The Star Justice set was designed to give a Classic Space building experience. Base, Ship, Rover, Scooter, Robots, and Energy Collection. There are simple play features, rotating radars, rockets, opening cockpits, and the like. Each part is reminiscent of a Classic Space era set, but updated with today’s parts. I’m fond of the Cosmic Peace Keeper ship, it’s fun and whooshy (that’s a technical term… sorry for the confusion). Oh and I like shooting skulls. They’re bad.

Andrew: How closely did you work with LEGO set designers to finalize your initial designs?

Mark: There was a LEGO designer on staff who reviewed our sets to ensure that they met build standards and weren’t fragile. Fortunately LEGO put a priority on preserving our designs, so what you see is little changed from the original designs.

Chris: We had 2 different LEGO designers build and review our sets. The second designer had been with the company since the 80’s and had worked on Classic lines of space. He actually finalized our models.

Andrew: When did you start working on this? How long did this process take from start to finish?

Chris: The idea was mentioned to us sometime in 2006. Paal Smith Meyer and others from LEGO were kicking around the idea of doing playthemes in factory. Minifig based sets. January 2007 was about the time it was “official” that we were doing space and we began looking at pieces for our palette. We started building concepts through March and April. Initial plans had this set coming out much earlier.

Mark: LEGO first asked us if there were special pieces we would like to have in LDD. Unfortunately a lot of the pieces we wanted were special use parts, or were scheduled to go out of production before our sets were scheduled.

LEGO doesn’t produce every part in every color all the time. Each year, there is a palette of parts that are produced in certain colors, and we have to work within that.

Once we had a palette worked out with LEGO, we hand-built our models at home because LEGO was still preparing the LDD palette. Once the palette was ready within the LDD program, we rebuilt our models in LDD and sent them to LEGO. The models were reviewed by the LEGO designer, and our sets were finalized in summer 2007.

Andrew: Okay, I’ll bite the bullet and ask the question everyone seems to be asking. Why are there stickers in the sets instead of printed pieces — especially the minifig torsos?

Chris: Printing parts is expensive. If you print a part that’s going only in one line of sets, you can’t spread that cost out because of it’s limited production. We hope the space sets sell a buhjillion copies… but factory sets usually are limited runs. We had the choice of either blank torsos or do stickers. Stickers were the best option. We talked to LEGO about these issues and they agreed that stickers were the way to go. We would use stickers IF: A) we could make them B) They would be on transparent film so they could be used in other applications other than our sets C) we get enough color to make them look cool and D) they would be a part available somehow on LDD or factory so kids who can’t afford our set can still get in on the action by building a small LDD ship and adding stickers. LEGO talked internally about this for a while and made it happen.

Mark and I sketched out some ideas and his mad Illustrator skills whipped em out and there ya go. The minifig torso is very expensive to produce… and you add printing it’s even more. If you note, they stopped putting the noggins on the minifigs.. to try and cut some production cost.

Mark: Like Chris said, printed parts are VERY expensive to produce, particularly minifigs. The most expensive part LEGO produces is the printed minifig torso.

We were given the option of using printed parts that existed in LDD, like the 2×2 computer slope that appears in a couple of our sets, or any existing printed minifigs in LDD, like the plaid shirt torso, or maybe a torso with dungarees printed on — not very spacey. Or we would have been stuck with blank minifig torsos, which would’ve been pretty boring.

LEGO also said that we could have stickers, and we could help design them. In an effort to get some more classic space style in our sets, we decided to go with the stickers. Chris and I sketched up some ideas, and I rendered them in Adobe Illustrator. We sent the designs to LEGO, and they made the stickers that will be in the sets.

I know a lot of people are disappointed by this. We would have liked to have our designs printed onto the minifigs, for sure. Unique printed parts were not an option. We did the best we could under the circumstances.

Andrew: What other constraints were you working within during the design process?

Chris: Pieces.

Mark: Even though LEGO offered us the ability to choose a few parts, the LDD palette is still very limited. I sometimes would encounter “gaps” in the basic brick, like certain sizes of plates or bricks in the colors I needed.

Chris: That became even more limiting as we went through the process…

The release date being pushed back had some parts removed from our palette causing some redesign in the Justice set (fairly heavy redesign). Not all parts that are “specifically spacey” are ones LEGO sees as a mass production/bulk brick, so there were limits on what we could build. Also, LDD doesn’t like some connections we AFOLs like.

Andrew: Will you be designing other sets for LEGO?

Chris: No idea. If they call I would certainly give it some thought!

Mark: We have not been asked to make more sets at this time.

Andrew: Have they given you job offers as set designers? Would you take it if they offered you a position?

Chris: No, no offers. I’d take a position if I could stay here and work from home. The commute to Denmark is killer. Mark and I have wives, (and I have a kiddo too), I don’t think uprooting to Europe is in the cards, but we haven’t come close to an offer.

Mark: No, there haven’t been job offers. Personally, I don’t think I would accept an offer like that at this stage of my life, because it would mean moving to Denmark. I’m married and mid-career as a graphic designer, so it wouldn’t really make sense for me to do so. However, if I were a single guy just out of college, I’d definitely consider it.

Edit: Oops! Forgot to link to a podcast interview with Chris and Mark as well, by Tom McDonald:

The amazing digital wizard

Dimitri Burakov is an incredibly talended LEGO renderer from Lithuania. He uses an array of programs to create anything from polished renders to professional instructions of LEGO models both official and fan-built.


I recently came across his works on Brickshelf and contacted him about cooperating on some projects. The results are amazing. Below is a beautiful rendering of my tripod mecha with sample instruction steps. In exchange, I shipped out a big package from S@H.

If you’re interested in having renderings and/or instructions done for your work by a professional, you can find Dimitri’s contact info at his Brickshelf gallery.

Croatian National Theater by Matija Puzar

Matija Puzar announced back in September that he had completed his LDraw design for a LEGO version of the Croatian National Theater.

As impressive as the design may have been, the actual creation is just plain gorgeous. The capitals on the columns are particularly beautiful.

Thanks to Brick Town Talk for pointing me to the real thing.

I can’t believe it’s not butter

Super-realistic render

Brickshelf user Shaggie has done an amazingly high quality render of a town scene involving misterzumbi’s Fiat126p design. This is certainly one of the most realistic LEGO renders I’ve seen.

Who is RACHAL?

RACHAL Example

RACHAL (RAytracing CHALlenge) is a challenge we run on ldraw.org where various people render the same virtual LEGO creation (typically a vignette like scene). The point of it is to allow people to challenge themselves on rendering a shared LEGO scene adding their own technical and artistic interpretations. The first one has just finished and it’s really fascinating to see how various people approach the same source material. If you like it you may also like its predeccesor that I ran early last year called “Remix Lenin”.

Gospel train

Well first I’ll say a hello to Brothers Brick readers out there. I’ve been invited to cover trains and virtual LEGO creations (raytraced, rendered but definitely not real) for the blog. I’m very new to this whole blogging thing having started my own blog a bit over a week ago and you probably won’t get many words out of me usually but I’m pretty sure I know a good creation when I see one and I guess that’s what you’re here to see.

To copy-paste my profile on the Brothers Brick “I’m a builder with a short attention span and a lot of virtual bricks. I’m probably most known as a train builder and was involved in the creation of LEGO set 10183 (the Hobby Train Box) but I do a lot of other stuff too. I’m also a member of the LDraw SteerCo and a webmaster for the site.”

Anyway, on to the good stuff…

James Mathis' Cascades Passenger Train

When I was just starting out building properly with LEGO (as opposed to the mucking around I did as a kid and young adult) the train builder who inspired me the most was James Mathis. I’ve since had the honour of working with James on a couple of projects as well as the Hobby Train Box. As well as being one of my favourite train builders James has the added advantage of allowing me to introduce both my areas of ‘research’: trains and virtual LEGO.

Andreas Weissenburg's Bird

And to give you something brand spanking new (well almost) I’d also like to show off Andreas Weissenburg’s Bird.

And I think I’ll leave my inaugaral post at that. Hope it’s all worked OK.

The return of Blacktron 1!

No, sadly, as the title might mislead, it is not a question of LEGO re-releasing the, in its days quite fantastic, Blacktron line. However, the space community more than makes up for that by producing some fun original models! First out is Ed Diment’s nicely chunky Black-CAT, a transport of sorts:

Ed Diment's Black-CAT

With a lot of moving parts, nice shape and a well-executed colour scheme, this is definitely something I’d have enjoyed as a kid. But no worries, I’ll enjoy it now instead.

Next up is Andrew Verner’s (aka Andrusi) Legion. At first sight one would think it is a CAD version of the original Blacktron Invader:

Andrusi's Legion

But lo and behold – he had us all fooled! With a few twists and turns it transforms into a robot!

Andrew has gone to great lengths to ensure that the ship mode still is modular, and he even put a .mpd file in his gallery which means that those with ldraw can take a look at how it is built (and even build their own!). Thank you for that Andrew!

And with that we end this session of nostalgia.

Cowboy Bebop-Hammerhead by Legoswami

Here’s the (sadly) only decent picture of legoswami’s Hammerhead. It is a ship from an anime called Cowboy Bebob. I haven’t seen the anime myself (to be honest, I haven’t seen any anime), but this is a nice piece of work regardless. Too bad the arm is unable to move.

It is modeled in a family of lego cad-programs. If you want to know more (it is a great way to build without using bricks!), a good place to start is ldraw.org.

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